Everyday Philosophy: Should we ban children from playing dangerous sports?

It’s always a risky thing to make sweeping generalizations about a country, especially when you’re an outsider, but it seems to me that a great many Americans take their sports very seriously. And “football” — or American football — seems to be one of the most serious. Year after year, American football ranks as the most popular sport in the US, both in terms of school and college participation (for men) and overall viewership. So, I will need to tread carefully with this question.

The best way to cowardly duck the sport-loving vitriol is to do what philosophy loves to do: extrapolate a general point. Rather than get bogged down with the particulars of American football, I will look at dangerous or aggressive contact sports more broadly. These are sports that are both physically violent and pose a not-insignificant risk of serious injury.

First, we shall look at the most utilitarian arguments against dangerous sports from philosophers like Pamela Sailors. Second, we shall look at J.S. Russell’s (philosophically) famous paper on “The Value of Dangerous Sport” and “Children and Dangerous Sport and Recreation” where he gives two reasons why he thinks dangerous sports should not only be allowed but encouraged.

We ban smoking — why not dangerous sports?

When discussing questions like this, which live in the frontier lands between ethics and law, we invariably fall into using utilitarian terminology. Almost all governments throughout history will make their laws based on “the greatest good for the greatest number” considerations. Lawmakers and ethicists have to sit down and draw up a colossal table of pros and cons. They have to pull in psychologists, doctors, physiotherapists, and educators to ask about the benefits and drawbacks of banning dangerous sports. And, if we’re focusing on the drawbacks, there are two camps.

First, the personal. Throughout a single life, what damage does high exposure to contact sports do? Unsurprisingly, the evidence doesn’t look good. Repeated concussions and head impacts in contact sports are linked to an increased risk of cognitive decline, depression, and neurodegenerative conditions. In later life, high-intensity contact sports can cause memory and motor issues. Of course, these are statistics and probabilities, not rules — many people play dangerous sports and do not suffer long-term medical harm. But here, Sailors uses smoking as a counterexample. Smoking does not cause lung cancer in 100% of smokers. But it massively and conclusively increases the risks of lung cancer. Likewise, dangerous sports will not harm everyone who plays them. But Sailors asks, “One wonders what percentage [of death or brain damage] would be sufficient to eliminate the ‘uncertainty objection’” against banning dangerous sports for children.

The second utilitarian argument — one which Clayton seems to be arguing — is the societal one. What does widespread and encouraged participation in dangerous sports do to a culture? Sailors argues that glorifying violence in violent sports will both explicitly and tacitly glorify certain undesirable personality traits. She argues that “competitiveness, aggression, violence, and winning [at all costs]” will lead to a “culture of criminality” where men adopt an “attitude of superiority to women.” Is it really possible to encourage a young man to be violent, aggressive, and combative and then suddenly become a normal, respectful member of society? Sailors thinks not.

Russell: The skills dangerous sports give you

Even if we accept Sailors’ premise that playing dangerous sports makes you more aggressive and competitive — a claim that even she admits is empirically “inconclusive” — is that always such a bad thing? Life is very rarely a gentle stroll by a lake. It’s full of hardships, struggles, and pain. There are very real challenges that all humans face — both external ones, in the form of other people and other states, as well as internal ones, in the form of mental health crises. We need to grow up a bit. We need to learn to be resilient, strong, and, yes, aggressive at times.

In his 2007 paper, Russell expresses the point like this: “The most direct and compelling argument for including physical risk in a child’s environment is that the world is physically dangerous and a child needs to learn to navigate those dangers as quickly as possible. Thus, the complete elimination from the environment of any risk of bodily injury would arguably leave children unprepared to confront physical risks or to make sound decisions about risks in their daily lives.”

If we are to learn real-life skills, we need to step outside a bit. We need to be exposed to real risk. You only learn to deal with things when you have things to deal with. We need a society full of people who can cope.

Russell’s second point in defense of dangerous sports is how they affect individual well-being and existential discovery. We thrive after overcoming genuine danger — not through pampered, anodyne “everyone wins!” competitions. As Russell puts it in his 2005 paper:

“An important type of self-realization requires a confrontation with, and an attempt to surpass, the apparent limits of oneself…. Dangerous sport, in its best exemplars — in, say, mountain climbing or boxing or bicycle stage racing — provides one avenue for such self-affirmation by challenging one’s whole self at the limits of one’s being. It is a particularly rich avenue of realization because it forces us to confront and overcome fear of danger and to face physical threats to those things that we cannot put a value on.”

In other words, we need to push ourselves to grow, and one of the best ways to do this is through dangerous sports.

A tipping of the scales

The reason this debate is often so heated and polarizing is that both sides can be right. It’s true that letting — or even forcing — children to participate in dangerous sports risks their current and future health. It’s possibly true that those raised on a diet of competitive, aggressive machismo might make for unpleasant characters in adulthood. But it’s also true that dangerous sports are fun and often good for your mental health. They test and strengthen you. They teach you to be hardier and that you can be hardy in the future when the future demands it.

And so, Clayton, the debate hinges not so much on the philosophy or the scientific data but on our cultural values. What matters more to you? How risk-averse are you when it comes to banning or limiting dangerous activities? Most societies have decided that smoking is sufficiently dangerous that it deserves to be banned for children. So, too, are knives, alcohol, and fireworks. So, why not dangerous sports? Well, perhaps the risk: the benefit scales haven’t tipped that far yet.

So, what can we say? We can say that dangerous sports present a non-trivial risk to a child’s life. We can say that there isn’t any conclusive evidence that playing dangerous sports increases sexual assaults or any kind of criminality, actually. Beyond that, though, this one comes down to opinions and values.