What football teaches us about ethics ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Sunday, February 08, 2026

What football teaches us about ethics

Today we celebrate one of the biggest sporting events in the world – the Super Bowl – and beneath the excitement lies a lesson about why ethics is unavoidable wherever humans organize systems.

Football began as a rough contest - rules were minimal, and harm was part of the spectacle. Today, the sport is intensely regulated with safety protocols, targeting and facemask rules, concussion protocols, and officiating systems all designed to reduce harm and sustain the game as a social institution. These are not arbitrary niceties; they are structural necessities that evolved and were imposed by the demands of human involvement.

What is the ideal balance between player safety, fair play, maintaining fans, attracting sponsors and entertaining the masses? It is not an easy question. But ethics is a major part of the discussion.

Few people want a game where the referees decide that a play was too rough and they must penalize one team based on their own instincts. The history of the game shows that safety rules are continuously refined to minimize subjectivity.

This mirrors a deeper truth: when human agency meets uncertainty and interdependence, ethics inevitably emerges - and structure becomes the necessary substitute for unavailable certainty. Human beings cannot know absolute moral truth, just as they cannot know absolute physical truth, but they must act responsibly anyway. Structure is a necessary proxy for absolute knowledge. We cannot know if the person celebrating a sack is mocking the quarterback but we can judge his actions to see if it violates the rules. There is some wiggle room for determining unsportsmanlike conduct but it is kept to a minimum so the game remains as fair as possible.

Actions have moral consequences and can be judged even when intentions remain uncertain.

When it comes to player safety, the league cannot know with certainty how many injuries a given play will cause. Fans cannot agree on what is “too violent.” Coaches disagree on strategy. Players differ on risk tolerance. Everyone’s intuition about harm and advantage will diverge, just as ethical intuitions diverge in life.

So the NFL uses structure - rules, enforcement, replay reviews, fines, and evolving protocols - to approximate ethical coordination among diverse participants and stakeholders. These structures are not moral truths; they are the pathways we use to operate under uncertainty in ways that reduce overall harm and preserve the system.

Different human domains generate different ethical landscapes, but the logic is the same: structure is needed wherever there is human interdependence and uncertainty.

Football is unusual because it does not pretend injury can be eliminated. Like boxing or certain dangerous professions, it accepts bounded harm as part of the activity. The ethical question is therefore not whether injury exists, but how that injury is governed. Professional football attempts, imperfectly, to constrain risk through rules, transparency, compensation, and safety protocols. College football, by contrast, lacks many of these stabilizing structures, making its ethical footing far less secure.

This difference illustrates a broader truth: ethics is the navigation of competing values. Values always clash. Any ethical system that pretends otherwise is flawed. It sounds facile to say that profit is a value, but for commercial ventures, it is - if the business fails, then employees lose their jobs, the business can no longer do positive things (the NFL is involved in many charities, for example.) Injuries are bad but ethics does not demand zero harm. It demands structure strong enough to both minimize harm and to stop unavoidable harm from becoming exploitation.

All mature ethical systems understand tradeoffs. Businesses must stay profitable but not at the expense of employee health. Armies put soldiers in harm's way but shouldn't send them on suicide missions with little benefit.

We can never know the consequences of our actions, since we cannot see the future, but we can impose controls around the present to reduce the chances of bad consequences. That is the structure that is at the core of every working ethical system. Structure matters more than absolute answers when we cannot possibly know with certainty what will happen.

So on Super Bowl Sunday, as you watch tackles and touchdowns, remember: what keeps the game viable is not just talent or spectacle. It’s the structure that makes human coordination possible without absolute certainty - the same logic that underlies all ethical systems.

And the next time someone argues that ethics is optional or subjective, you can point to football and say: No. Ethics is emergent and necessary. It’s inevitable wherever humans must act under uncertainty with consequences that matter. That’s a lesson worth remembering long after the Lombardi Trophy is raised.