Bloodlust or Civic Ritual? The Moral Dilemma of Watching Football

In his Guardian column, “American football is too dangerous, and it should be abolished,” David Bry doesn’t just critique the sport—he indicts its audience. Football, he argues, is not merely unsafe; it’s immoral. He anticipates the backlash to this charge and admits, with self-deprecating honesty, that he’s no moral saint himself—he still eats foie gras, knowingly prioritizing his pleasure over a duck’s suffering. But to him, there’s a moral line between indulging in ethically murky cuisine and consuming a sport that rewards the destruction of human bodies for mass entertainment. If he values human life more than duck life, he cannot, in good conscience, support a game that feeds off head trauma and early death.

Bry insists the game can’t be meaningfully reformed. The violence is not incidental—it’s structural. Helmets and rule changes may offer cosmetic fixes, but the fundamental problem lies in the collisions themselves: the brain, he writes, “sloshes around and smashes against its bone casing.” No amount of tweaking can erase that brutal fact. While his friend Todd defends the freedom of adults to play if they choose, Bry shifts the focus from the players to the fans. The deeper immorality, he claims, lies not on the field but in the stands and living rooms, where audiences cheer and fund the spectacle that maims its participants.

This position challenges evolutionary theorists like Jonathan Gottschall, who argue that violent sports are hardwired into us. From his view, sports like football are not moral failures, but social adaptations—ritualized combat that establishes hierarchies and offers a controlled outlet for natural male aggression. If we don’t have football, we’ll invent some other surrogate for the same primal thrill.

And here lies the moral paradox: If we are biologically inclined to enjoy violence in symbolic form, can we still be held ethically accountable for watching it? Or does evolutionary determinism become a convenient alibi that masks complicity? Is football a barbaric indulgence we should outgrow—or a necessary safety valve that prevents worse outcomes?

This tension gets at the philosophical core of the football debate. Are we morally responsible for what we watch, or are we acting out ancient instincts that override reason and empathy? If Bry is right, we’re sanitized Romans in bleachers, watching men destroy themselves for our pleasure. If Gottschall is right, those same bleachers might be the only thing keeping us from something darker, something more chaotic, something even harder to justify.

Ultimately, the question is not whether football is violent—we know it is—but whether our appetite for it can be governed by ethics or will simply reinvent itself in another uniform, another arena, another “acceptable” outlet. Are we spectators or just better-dressed predators?