I have given a lot of thought recently to the idea that things that happen early in your life have the potential to significantly impact the quality of your life later on or to lengthen or shorten your life. I don't have detailed statistics here, but I have heard that the life expectancy for football players, for example, is dramatically shorter than the average, and this is probably largely due to the physical toll the game has on players' bodies. They may be in extraordinary physical shape at 25, but taking hit after hit after hit comes back to haunt them at 50 or 60.
Something that hits more closely to home is that, since I have chosen a career and overall lifestyle that is on the more sedentary side, there are some serious risks to my health later in life. I don't really like the ways that I can mitigate this (eating right and exercising), but I still have to strongly consider their value right now.
This whole line of thinking got me on the track of how this might create some moral dilemmas that we don't often think about. Let me pose a few theoretical and necessarily morbid scenarios to illustrate.
First, going with the football theme, imagine a receiver catches the ball and is tackled, but a second defensive player lays down a late hit that results in the receiver getting a concussion. The late hit is penalized, but it was strategic. The strategy does not carry the intention of trying to injure the receiver, but rather to make the receiver gun-shy the next time he reaches for the ball and reduce the receiver's confidence to catch the ball on future downs. Further imagine that the concussion was the tipping point that later caused the receiver to fall into dementia unlike he otherwise would have and also die three or four years earlier than he otherwise would have.
Second, imagine a driver who is not fully drunk, but who is impaired by alcohol, and runs a stop sign and strikes a pedestrian who happens to be jaywalking. The pedestrian does not survive.
Third, imagine two twenty-something friends climbing a tree for whatever reason when one unintentionally bumps the other causing him to fall and badly damage his leg to the point where it never heals properly. That friend is then less physically active than he otherwise would have been throughout the rest of his life, and this leads to a less healthy lifestyle and an earlier death than he otherwise would have had.
Fourth, imagine some people jump their neighbor's fence and use his pool when the neighbor is on vacation. In the process, imagine one of them drowns.
Ethically and/or morally, are the defensive football player and the driver any different in scenarios one and two? I know that it is difficult-to-impossible to map one incident earlier in life to an early death later in life. Since the aggressors in both scenarios had reason to believe that their actions were somewhat unsafe, though, is the badness or goodness of their actions on the same par? There is a good chance that the driver in the second scenario would face manslaughter charges for his recklessness. Regarding the first scenario, though, many defensive football coaches would expect their players to occasionally deliver a dangerous and even illegal hit simply due to the nature of the game.
Ethically and/or morally, are scenarios three and four any different? Is the friend who bumps his cohort better or worse than the neighbor whose pool is broken into? In real life, the person who owns the pool will probably be held more legally responsible for the death in his pool than the friend in the tree will be for the eventual death he causes. Is there any real difference between them at a moral or ethical level, though?
In case it is not obvious, it is my opinion that scenarios one and two contain the same moral value and that scenarios three and four also contain the same moral value. The disregard for human life is the same with the football player and the buzzed driver, and the negligence is the same with the the friend and the pool owner. For practical reasons, the law does not see these scenarios equally. My question is do you?
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2 comments:
I wrote a long comment, practically a blog unto itself and voila it is gone.
I know in my own body I am noticing probably just now at my age that some of the sports I've played are taking a bit of a toll. I also heard that eating right and exercising only gain you a year or two in life span, so it makes me not as crazed about making sure I do it. There's also a quality of life issue on the way there too. Of course if you get hit by the car in scenario #2, it doesn't really matter how much you exercised, right?
Sportsmanship is lacking if a coach orders a wrongful play and everyone should be in trouble for that the player and the coach. However since the long term effects cannot be linked, it is just a play in a game. If the concussion resulted in death immediately thereafter, no doubt there would be wrongful death suits. The law seems to have to use the statute of limitations or everything could conceivable point back to something else and it would be never ending litigation. Oh, well, uh, we have that.
This blog is brilliant. I'm not sure I have an answer cogent enough to be worth posting, but this topic is likely not something I ever would have thought about if not for this blog and this post.
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