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A Key Moral Issue: Should Boxing be Banned? K. Jones Published online: 06 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: K. Jones (2001) A Key Moral Issue: Should Boxing be Banned?, Culture, Sport, Society, 4:1, 63-72, DOI: 10.1080/713999812 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/713999812

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KEN JONES

The question of whether the sport of boxing ought to be banned has been one of the key moral issues in recent sporting history. The campaign to ban the sport began in earnest with the adoption in 1982 of a policy, and in 1984 of a formal resolution, by the British Medical Association (BMA), determining that ‘in view of the proven ocular and brain damage resulting from professional boxing, the Association should campaign for its abolition.’1 The call was taken up by sister bodies in the United States (American Medical Association) and Canada (Canadian Medical Association) within two years, and others have followed: the Australian Medical Association (AMA) extended its banning campaign in 1991 to the amateur version.2 By 1996, with no immediate prospect of a ban in Britain or US, it might have seemed that the battle was over, or at least stuck in the trenches. (Indeed, the collapse of the Soviet system gave professional boxing an even larger following since professional, though not amateur, boxing was banned in most Communist countries on ideological grounds, as a paradigm of capitalist exploitation.) However, the Dunblane massacre of 13 March 1996 opened a debate about violence in society, and gave rise to proposals to restricting the activities of gun-clubs. This – combined with growing public hostility to blood sports such as fox hunting – gave new impetus to the BMA campaign against boxing. (In 1996, the BMA released a film pointing out the savagery of the sport which coincided with the Cullen report on Dunblane.)3 Recently, MPs from both the Liberal Democrats (most notably Menzies Campbell, spokesperson on sport), and the Labour Party (most notably Roy Hattersely, Peter Hain and Sam Galbraith) have mooted a ban. Much is often made of the moral superiority of amateur over professional boxing, and not all who advocate the banning of professional boxing are necessarily opposed to the amateur version. Cuba, for instance, abolished professional boxing but retained amateur boxers, many of whom became Olympic champions. Iceland banned professional boxing in 1956 (after a post-fight riot) but retained the amateur version; Sweden did the same in 1970 (citing health grounds), and Norway in 1981 (citing criminal involvement in the sport).4 In my view, rather too much is made of the moral Culture, Sport, Society, Vol.4, No.1 (Spring 2001), pp.63–72 PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

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superiority of the amateur version. First, though amateur and professional boxing are conducted under different codes, they are not fundamentally different sports. Second, most boxers are amateurs (professional boxers are a very small minority): this means that many more amateurs than professionals are exposed to injury, notwithstanding the much safer conditions. Hence, if the objection to boxing is on health and safety grounds, it would make more sense to ban the amateur rather than the professional code. Third, amateurism in boxing as in many other sports is often no more than a sham with promising amateurs receiving scholarships, training funds, travel expenses, sponsorship and product endorsement earnings, appearance fees, etc. (The Thai featherweight Somluck Kamsing received gifts exceeding £1.5 million after winning gold at the Atlanta Olympics, 1996.)5 Finally, while professionalism turns sporting talent into a marketable commodity, there is no need to despise it on that account. On the contrary, one could argue that, rather than cheapening sport, professionalization accords boxing talent its proper value. My principle interest in this paper though is not with the history or sociology of the anti-boxing campaign but with the main moral arguments employed in the campaign. Four distinct arguments can be separated out: i. the argument from health and safety (by far the strongest argument); ii. the argument from intentional harm; iii. the argument from violence; iv. the argument from social responsibility. It is my contention that none of these arguments is as strong as the anti-boxing movement like to think and neither individually nor collectively establish the moral case against boxing. There are also the practical implications of a ban to be considered: the question must be asked whether the ban would, in fact, produce a better state of affairs since there is the real possibility that banning boxing may force it underground where the medical controls would be negligible or nonexistent, and hence leave us with a situation where the health risks would be higher than if the sport had remained legal. At any rate, it would be intolerable in a liberal society to permit a mixture of cultural bias, muddled thinking, and questionable statistics, to lead to the banning of an activity enjoyed by millions (both participants and spectators) throughout the world. The Argument from Safety and Health In recent years, there has developed a substantial corpus of work on the medical effects of both professional and amateur boxing. For example, a survey by Dr Richard Butler in 1993, reported by the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry,6 found that 41 per cent of amateur boxers (who wear headguards) had detectable anomalies in brain scans, against 14 per cent of participants in other sports; the boxers consistently scored lower

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in a range of intelligence tests, with the lowest scores among those who had recorded more than 40 bouts. This data (coupled with more anecdotal data) provides the basis for the main argument in favour of a boxing ban. How, it is asked, can society continue to tolerate a sport that is so damaging to the health of its participants? To give the argument more formal expression: 1. All sports that involve a risk to health (and sometimes lead to death) are immoral. 2. All immoral activities should be banned. 3. Boxing is a sport that involves a risk to health. Therefore: 4. Boxing is immoral. Therefore: 5. It should be banned. The health risks in boxing are real enough. No one denies that boxing is a blood sport: lips are spilt, noses and ears are deformed, retinas are detached, bones are broken, internal organs are battered and bruised, brains are concussed (sometimes leading to ‘dementia pugilistica’, boxers’ dementia or punch-drunk syndrome), and sometimes death. At the same time, we are entitled to question the consistency of the position of the BMA and like organizations. Risk per se does not amount to a moral case for abolition for this would have the consequence of outlawing most sports since few sports are risk-free. Data from a survey, carried out by the University of Sheffield, of 28,000 people aged 16–45, covering five of the most popular sports concluded that rugby was by far the most dangerous, with 95.7 ‘substantive injuries’ occurring for every 1,000 ‘occasions of participation’ (which, given team sizes, means an average of two or three players having a potentially serious injury, or needing medical treatment, after every game); this included 8 to 12 catastrophic injuries, such as broken necks per rugby season, and there have been at least 13 deaths since 1970. This index is very much higher than for other sports (soccer, for example, scoring 64.4, hockey 62.6, martial arts 45.9 and badminton 28.7). In all, there were 19.3 million sporting injuries per year, half in the serious category.7 Opponents of boxing often highlight the possibility of death in the ring but, as far as risk of death is concerned, boxing is not the most dangerous sport. According to coroners’ reports to the Office of Population Census and Surveys, for the years 1986–92 there were three deaths in England and Wales attributed to boxing. In the same period, there were 77 deaths in motor sport, 69 in air sports, 54 in mountaineering, 40 in ball games, and 28 in horse riding.8 In a BBC1 Sportsnight programme, 1 March 1995, 9.00

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p.m., devoted to the campaign against boxing, statistics were provided showing that, over the previous 9 years (1986–95), in Britain there were 94 deaths in horse-riding, 4 in cricket, and only 2 in boxing.9 On The British Medical Association’s own statistics there were 3 boxing deaths between 1986 and 1992, 9 in cricket, 31 in other ball games, and 94 in horse riding.10 The BMA has maintained a respectful silence on these other sports. On pain of inconsistency, the BMA must offer an explanation as to why boxing should be singled out for banning from other, more dangerous, sports.

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The Argument from Intentional Harm The argument from intentional harm tries to meet the charge of inconsistency. It tries to explain why boxing should be singled out for banning from other, more dangerous, sports. Here the focus shifts from the harm itself to the intention: it is not the harm itself that is objected to but the intention to harm. As the Journal of the American Medical Association put it: It is morally wrong for one human being to attempt intentionally to harm the brain of another. The major purpose of a sport event is to win. When the surest way to win is by damaging the opponent’s brain, and this becomes standard procedure, the sport is morally wrong.11 Or, as Parry neatly puts it in his recent article ‘Violence and Aggression in Contemporary Sport’: John might hurt someone in cricket, but he won’t get runs or wickets for that. In boxing, he might win just by doing that. Indeed, hurting or harming someone so badly that he cannot continue the contest is a sufficient condition of victory.12 To give the argument formal expression: 1. Intentionally harming another is morally wrong. 2. The aim of boxing (uniquely) is intentionally to harm another. Therefore: 3. Boxing is morally wrong. Though the argument is formally valid, premise 2 is questionable. It could be argued that the aim of a boxing is not to harm one’s opponent but to win the contest either by a knock-down or by scoring more points than your opponent. Of course to win one has, per accidens, to hurt one’s opponent but the intention is not to hurt but to score more points and therefore win the contest. Hurt – both physical and mental – may be a symptom of a point being scored but it is not a criterion for a point being scored. This is evidenced by the fact that judges and referees score points

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not on the basis of hurt and injury but on the basis of force, location, and precision of the punch. The uniqueness clause in premise 2 – boxing is unique among sports in intentionally harming another – is also questionable. If boxing involves harmful intent then so does aikido, karate, judo, jujitsu, wrestling, kung-fu, kick-boxing, tae kwon do, etc. Further, many non-combat sports allow limited harmful intent: bodyline bowling in cricket, charging and tackling in rugby, soccer, ice-hockey, American football. It is not clear how an aggressive rugby tackle to stop a try, is significantly different in intention from a boxer punching an opponent to score points in order to win the fight. The Argument from Violence This line of reasoning abandons the issue of intention and asserts that, irrespective of intention, boxing is violent and this fact alone is sufficient to make it immoral. To give the argument formal expression: 1. Violence is (by definition) morally unjustified. 2. Boxing is violent. Therefore: 3. Boxing – being a form of violence – is morally unjustified. This is a much more substantial argument than the argument from intention and goes to the core of the common complaint that boxing is ‘obscene’ and ‘degrading’. A key question though is, ‘What exactly is violence?’ ‘Violence’ is not harm or injury per se (the harm caused to a rapist or mugger in self-defence is not violence) rather it is ‘unjustified harm or injury’ – where the emphasis is on ‘unjustified’. So the key question is whether the harm and injury that occurs in boxing is justified or not. Normally, for there to be violence, i.e. ‘unjustified harm or injury’, there must be a coincidence of injury with ‘iniuria’; that is, the harm of injury suffered must coincide with the infringement of a right. Thus, for example, murder is violence because the harm is an infringement of one’s right to life. But it could be argued there is no infringement of a right in boxing since participants have consented to the risk. In boxing, as in other contact sports, the maxim ‘violenti non fit iniuria’ (to one who has consented no harm is done) operates. It could be countered that consent is not informed or free: boxers are more or less ‘forced’ into the sport through social or economic pressure. But even if this were true in some cases, it constitutes an argument not for a comprehensive ban, but for restricting boxing to the relatively well-off since no poor man or women could prove that they were free to take up the sport, rather than acting under the ‘duress’ of their circumstances.13 Few would

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accept this conclusion since it would be perceived as a denial of opportunity for the less well off in society. There is a further point to be made about the pain, hurt and injury that occurs in boxing. Boxing – like mountaineering, sailing in stormy seas, rugby, etc. – involves a considerable amount of personal pain, discomfort, injury and risk, but this is justified because it is ennobling. The Nietzschean aspect of sport in general, and boxing in particular, ought not to be ignored. Many sports are valuable just because they provide opportunities for the triumph of spirit over body, will over pain, determination over obstacle. Colin Radford speaks of boxing in these terms in ‘Utilitarianism and the Noble Art’,14 as does Parry in ‘Violence and Aggressive Sport’ who speaks of ‘the particular virtues of boxing’ as: the courage involved in putting oneself on the line...; in putting one’s entire self on the line …; the facing of injury, danger and risk; the absolute reliance on one’s personal resources; the discipline involved in attaining and maintaining extremely high levels of fitness and endurance, and so on.15 So we might grant that boxing does involve injury and sometimes death but could defend it on the grounds that the good (it is ennobling) outweighs the bad (it is harmful). One could say: ‘Yes boxing is in a sense “brutal” but it is also “noble” and the latter outweighs the former.’ Just as a work of art may be judged ‘obscene’ or ‘offensive’, nevertheless defend itself on the grounds that its artistic merits outweigh its offensiveness. (Sec.ii of the Obscene Publications Act, 1959 permits ‘an artistic merit defences’.) So boxing may be judged as ‘obscene’ or ‘offensive’ but defend itself on the grounds that its sporting merits outweigh its ‘offensiveness’. It is not clear to me how Lennox Lewis is any different from (say) the French operation/performance artist Orlan who regularly ‘brutalizes’ her body – endures the repositioning of her fat deposits, the realigning of her facial bones, the redesigning of her flesh (strips of skin, fat and flesh), etc. – in the name of art. (The same could be said for ear, tongue, nose, and lip piercing, cosmetic tattooing, patterned scarring of the face or body, etc.) The former ‘brutalizes’ his body in the pursuit of sporting excellence, the latter ‘brutalizes’ her body in the pursuit of artistic excellence. What is the difference? Why the cultural bias towards art over sport? The Argument from Social Responsibility So far we have focused on the (alleged) harmful effects on those in the ring (i.e. boxers), but there are also the harmful effects on those outside the ring (i.e. spectators, the boxing public). The argument from social responsibility

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asserts that boxing ought to be outlawed not just to protect boxers (from themselves) but to protect the boxing public (from itself). A comparison is sometimes made between boxing and pornography: just as our concern with pornography is not only about the harmful effects on the men and women who make pornography (they may be forced, exploited, etc.) but also the harmful effects on the consumers of pornography (it tends to ‘deprave and corrupt’, leading to sex crimes.) Similarly, our concern with boxing is not just about the harmful effects on boxers (they get hurt and injured and sometimes die) but also the harmful effects on the boxing public (being a ‘celebration of violence’, following boxing tends to ‘deprave and corrupt’, leads to anti-social behaviour). To give the argument formal expression: 1. Any activity that tends to anti-social behaviour ought to be banned. 2. Spectating or supporting boxing tends to lead to anti-social behaviour. Therefore: 3. Spectating boxing, being socially harmful, ought to be banned. The weak link in this argument (as in the pornography case) concerns causality: there is no empirical evidence to show that spectating boxing causes or leads to anti-social behaviour. Nor would it be enough to show that sometimes a riot breaks out after a fight because (say) fans felt outraged at an unjust decision against their boxer. It would have to be shown that the cause of the riot lay in spectating the boxing itself rather than (say) drink, boredom, the desire of the macho male for thrills, etc. (We must be wary of making boxing a scapegoat for social problems whose causes lie elsewhere.) Indeed, a good case could be made for the contrary position: that boxing diminishes anti-social behaviour by functioning as a safety-valve for aggressive tendencies. Thus the angry young man who vents his aggression through boxing utilizes a socially acceptable channel for emotions which might otherwise have led him to criminal acts of violence. The irony might be that banning boxing may have the opposite effect to that intended, leading to more not less anti-social behaviour. As Parry puts it: ‘To suppress the sport then would be to remove a possible safety valve as well as to leave time vacant for more naked viciousness.’16 Finally, the problem of consistency haunts this argument as it does other arguments we have considered. The point is that boxing is not the only sport regarded as anti-social. Anti-social behaviour follows football matches on a fairly regular basis all over the world. (As it does pop concerts and no one, except perhaps Roger Scruton, would suggest banning pop concerts.) Indeed, by comparison with football, the size of the boxing public is quite small and insignificant. In any case, the solution to the problem of antisocial behaviour lies not in banning boxing or football or pop concerts but in better policing and better education.

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The Practical Implications of a Ban on Boxing We must now turn to the practical implications of a ban on boxing. So far I have been mostly concerned with the moral case against boxing, but further argumentation is needed to move from ‘Boxing is immoral’ to ‘Boxing should be banned’ because a legally enforceable ban brings with it a whole new set of considerations. (Generally, moral disapproval is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for banning some activity.) First, we must ask whether a ban would produce a better state of affairs than that which existed before the ban was introduced. The main worry here is that a ban may well force the sport underground where the medical controls would be negligible or non-existent, the consequences being much higher health risks to boxers than if boxing had remained legal. If boxing is unsafe in the present regulated form, with all the stipulations about health monitoring, the provision of medical facilities, the disciplinary apparatus, and so on, we may consider how much more unsafe it would become if driven underground. Second, the boxing ‘industry’ is well resourced and would not take a ban lying down. It would not only fight enabling legislation but might take legal proceedings against the civil authority and claim compensation for loss of the wages of thousands of individuals: not just boxers themselves, but promoters, cornermen, managers, trainers, referees, boxing correspondents, editors and journalists employed on boxing magazines, etc. Society ought to think again about banning boxing if there is no conceivable chance of success at enforcement or if the costs needed to enforce the ban proved to be too prohibitive. Third, even if the ends (cessation of boxing) were just (and achievable) would the means (fines and possible imprisonment) to secure the end be just? The point is do we really want to fine and possibly send sportsmen (and women since women’s boxing is growing) to prison for nothing more than participating in a sport they enjoy and in which they only harmed themselves? Liberal societies should be as reluctant to send sportsmen and women to jail for practising their chosen sport as they are to send artists to jail for practising their chosen art. Fourth, a ban on boxing would be seen as the ‘thin end of the wedge’ for all combat sports – e.g. karate, wrestling, judo, aikido, kung-fu, kickboxing, tae kwon do, etc. Indeed, why stop with combat sports? If harm to health is the chief rationale for a ban on boxing then what about high risk, non-combat sports such as motorcycling, horse riding, mountaineering, round the world yachting, and so on.

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Conclusions In the light of these practical difficulties and the fact that the standard moral arguments against boxing are not as strong as proponents like to think, perhaps the best way forward is to urge reforms that stop short of a ban. Two reforms may be worth thinking about. Direct punches to the head could be forbidden to protect boxers from short- and long-term injury to the brain. The rules of safety in boxing already forbids the use of the thumb in the eye, the punch ‘below the belt’, the punch to the back of the head, as too damaging. These rules could be extended to forbid any punches to the head. If punches to a man’s genitalia are too damaging, then so are punches to the brain. This would be a fairly radical reform and would effectively mean the end of a win by a ‘knock out’. (A fight would be won or lost on points only.) However, it would go some way to take the sting out of the charge that boxing is ‘barbaric’.18 It is crucial that boxers are informed of the risks involved in their sport. If the consent to box is to be genuinely free, then it must be informed. That is, boxers must understand that, every time they get into the ring, they are likely to suffer immediate hurt and possibly long-term harm to brain and body. So to ensure that boxers are sufficiently knowledgeable about the risks, the regulating authorities should have to produce an examination which tested a boxer’s knowledge of recent medical research, especially the long-term effects of repeated blows to the head. Before an individual boxer could enter the ring, he/she would have to pass the examination and produce the certificate of success. University of Ulster, Coleraine NOTES 1. British Medical Association Board of Science and Education, Report of the Working Party on Boxing (London: BMA, 1984). This ‘stage setting’ part of the paper owes much to Ciaran O’Maolain, ‘A Noble Art? The Ethics of Banning Boxing’ (dissertation submitted for the degree of Master of Arts in Ethics and Philosophy of Religion, University of Ulster, 1997.) 2. B. Jones, A Year of It (Lower Hutt, NZ: Inprint, 1992). 3. L. Hunt, ‘Doctors’ film aims savage blow at boxing’, Independent, 31 Oct. 1996, and John Duncan, ‘BMA goes to the pictures in new bid to have boxing ruled out for the count’, Guardian, 31 Oct. 1996. I wish to thank O’Maolain for this information. 4. O’Maolain, ‘A Noble Art?’, 47. 5. D. Herbert, Fight Facts and Funnies (London: Boxing News Ltd., 1997). 6. Dr R. Butler, ‘A Prospective Controlled Investigation of the Cognitive Effects of Amateur Boxing’, Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 56 (1993), 1055–61. See also Dr R. Butler, ‘Neuropsychological Investigation of Amateur Boxers: A Review’, IABA (International Amateur Boxing Association Bulletin), Special Edition (April 1994), 47–57. 7. Sports Council, Injuries in Sport and Exercise: Main Report (London: Sports Council, 1991). Boxing was not included in the study, which was mainly concerned with amateur team sports.

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8. These figures were cited in the House of Lords debate about boxing in 1995. Hansard (Lords), DLXIII, 308, 5 April 1995. 9. J. Parry, ‘Violence and Aggression in Contemporary Sport’, in M. J. McNamee and S.J. Parry (eds), Ethics and Sport (London and New York: E & FN Spon, 1998), pp.205–24. 10. British Medical Association, The Boxing Debate (London: British Medical Association, 1993). 11. ‘Boxing should be Banned in Civilised Countries – Round 3’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 255 (1986), 2483–4. Editorial. Quoted in N. Warburton, ‘Freedom to Box’, Journal of Medical Ethics, 24 (1998), 56–60, p.58. 12. Parry, Ethics and Sport, 21. 13. Ibid., 60. 14. C. Radford, ‘Utilitarianism and the Noble Art’, Philosophy, 63 (1988), 11–23. See also R.K. Eliot, ‘Aesthetics and Sport’, in H.T.A. Whiting and Don Masterson (eds), Readings in the Aesthetics of Sport (London: Lepus Books, 1974), pp.42–52. 15. Parry, Ethics and Sport, p.222. 16. Ibid., p.171. An early version of this view is to be found in Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, trans. M. Kerr Wilson (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966) where he suggests that sport ‘educates man to a conscious and responsible control of his own fighting behaviour’, p.280. 17. Parry, Ethics and Sport, p.69. 18. R. Gillon, ‘Doctors should not try to Ban Boxing – but Boxing’s Own Ethics suggest Reform’, Journal of Medical Ethics, 24 (1998), 3–4.