Flutterby™! : Football and the ethics of injury risk

Malcolm Potts: 110/111: Football, CTE and risk-taking:

For some years I had the privilege of chairing the campus Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects (CPHS). We often spent time discussing relatively simple ethical questions. Nothing ever approached the gravity of discussing how a young person should make a choice about a risk with a high probability of causing increasingly incapacitating brain damage. I can’t be sure how the CPHS might respond to the question – should the campus permit Cal football to continue? I suspect that they would emphasize that if it does continue then the campus has an ethical responsibility to ensure players are making a fully informed choice when they accept a highly significant risk of catastrophic damage over the remainder of their lives.

Via Eλf Sternberg @elfsternberg, who observed:

Imagine if your high school advocated a program for which 99.09% of those who enrolled would suffer brain damage: