Brain-Injured Footballers, Voluntary Choice and Social Goods. A Reply to Corlett

ABSTRACT

In this essay, we respond to Angelo Corlett’s criticism of our paper ‘Ethics, Brain Injuries, and Sports: Prohibition, Reform, and Prudence’. To do so, first, we revisit certain assumptions and arguments Corlett makes concerning intercollegiate football and brain injuries in his 2014 paper ‘Should intercollegiate football be eliminated?’. Second, we identify and criticize two key elements in his response regarding (a) ‘luck egalitarianism’, and (b) ‘public goods’. We conclude by reaffirming our critical reading of Corlett’s original 2014 paper and by identifying further elements (i) luck and the nature of individual responsibility; and (ii) the nature of sports as public rather than merely private goods, that he would have to address for his latter 2018 position to hold true.

KEYWORDS:

• Concussions
• ethics
• responsibility
• public goods
• football

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Using these terms as a heuristic device, we do not hereby commit ourselves to any metaphysical position on the fact value dichotomy.

2. Despite agreeing with Corlett that the two types of aspects must be addressed separately, we argue that he underplays the potential connection between the two of them. If the normative and descriptive aspects of Corlett’s analysis are connected, then his analysis loses part of its conditional character. We do not endorse an absolute position on the distinction between description and normativity. Rather like the tired fact: value dichotomy, it may nevertheless be a useful heuristic (see Putnam 2004).

3. Indeed, the combination of both types of aspects aligns with Corlett’s intent of ‘focus[ing] on more serious concerns within the confines of the real world in which we find ourselves’ (Corlett 2014, 117). A philosophical analysis that applies to the real world must, according to him, avoid drawing a clear-cut distinction between normative and empirical analyses. We concur with this.

4. To the extent that medical and brain sciences discover a solid link between CTE and normal football play and given the current health-care system in the US which requires medical providers to provide medical assistance to those in need of vital medical care, the subsidizing of inter-collegiate football programs forces economic costs onto others (the general public) in order to support it (say, in the forms of substantially increased health-care premiums and medical costs due to football-caused CTE-related injuries) (Corlett 2018, 8).

5. To further explore the issue of value of leisure, see Parry and Long (1989), McNamee (1994), and Telfer (1987).

6. As one of the anonymous reviewers of the journal points out, further distinctions are needed here. For instance, we would need to clarify what kind of public good sport is and differentiate it from other types of publicly shared goods such as common goods, the common good, social goods and basic goods. However, we will leave this task for a different work, for all we want to point out here is that Corlett assumes Rawls’ concept of ‘primary good’ without providing a solid justification for it. For an analysis of the concept of ‘public goods’, see Buchanan (1967), Kallhoff (2011), Inge (2003) and Cornes and Sandler (1994). Also, for an interpretation of the relationship between Rawls’ notion of ‘primary goods’ and sport different from Corlett’s, see Murray and Murray (2011) and Murray (2018).