← Return to search results
Back to Prindle Institute

The Responsibilities of Sports Organizations

photograph of remote in hand with TV in background displaying NFL logo on screen

Deshaun Watson, the NFL quarterback who recently moved to the Cleveland Browns in a $230 million deal, has been credibly accused of sexual harassment or assault by 24 massage therapists. These allegations are not new: at the time that the Browns signed him this summer, there were 22 therapists who had accused him. Just this week, he settled out of court with 20 of his accusers, though several cases still persist.

Watson is not the only sports player to be accused of horrendous behavior. Manchester City’s Benjamin Mendy has been charged with raping five women; a player for their city rivals Manchester United, Mason Greenwood, is currently on bail after accusations that he raped and assaulted his then-girlfriend. (I have previously written about Ben Roethlisberger and Cristiano Ronaldo, the allegations they face, and how fans should respond.)

Neither player currently plays an active role for their club, but there have been calls for Greenwood to be reinstated – one only needs to search his name on Twitter to see those protesting for his return. The fans calling for his return either do not care that he has done something awful or they do not believe he could do such a thing (in spite of the video and audio clips his ex-girlfriend posted documenting his abuse).

Should these players be allowed to play after credible allegations?

That’s the question I want to take up – and, though I’ll focus on sex offences and hideous behavior towards women, my argument covers a whole range of bad behavior.

Relatedly, Kurt Streeter has argued in The New York Times that Watson should be barred from ever playing in the NFL: “A signal would have been sent: The N.F.L. is no longer willing to put the games and the myth and the money ahead of absolutely everything.” This needs to be a lifetime ban because previous suspensions for awful behavior – like domestic violence – have been for a few games, or half a season, and have had little impact and sent no such message. (There are reports that Watson will be banned for one year.)

Streeter’s argument really does seem to turn on sending a message: “The league needs to send the most potent message it can that sexual misconduct won’t be tolerated.” And his argument can generalize to all the other sports where players act with arrogance and impunity. But is this a good argument? And can it stand against the fact that Watson claims he is innocent and has yet to be found guilty in any legal realm?

Watson’s lawyer has claimed that “happy endings” were a common part of massage, while also claiming that Watson never had any sexual contact during a massage. A peculiar defense. Yet Watson was not charged on any of nine counts put before a grand jury in Texas. The importance of noting this is not, though, to argue that he did not do these things, rather it is to introduce an important distinction between the legal and the moral – and their standards of proof.

One potential response is that we should let the legal system do its job. This defense might carry some weight if we had a perfect legal system, but it is no surprise that rich and powerful sportspeople sometimes avoid appropriate legal sanctions. When Ben Roethlisberger faced allegations of sexual assault, the responding officer had earlier posed for a photo with Roethlisberger and arguably did not treat is accuser’s allegations with the seriousness we might expect – some witnesses claim that the officer was clearly on Roethlisberger’s side.

Further, there are issues with the standards of proof used in the legal realm. You need to show beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime has been committed. But in the moral realm, we might accept that there is a reasonable doubt over whether somebody has committed an offense while still thinking it is very likely they have done it – and wanting to distance ourselves from them as much as possible. You might not want to hang out with a former friend plausibly accused of murder who gets off on a technicality. We cannot rely solely on the legal system in making our moral judgments.

Still, this raises a further question:

should sports be in the moral business at all? Aren’t sports an escape from the rest of the world, a place where we can simply relax and enjoy the skills on display?

Well, no. This might be true of, say, a game of pick-up basketball or a pub league game of soccer. But it isn’t true of the major sports that deal in billions of dollars and attract millions of fans. These are major social institutions. And these institutions have influence.

Much as there’s a powerful objection to engaging with regimes that violate human rights – because to do so is to blemish ourselves morally – couldn’t there also be a similar objection to engaging with people who have shown themselves to be awful? One way of sketching this point is as Streeter’s argument: that major social institutions need to send a message that bad behavior won’t be tolerated. There might be a few reasons for this, but here’s a plausible one: social institutions should try to encourage morally good behavior!

But we can also sketch this in another way and extend Streeter’s argument. It isn’t just that the NFL needs to send a message that such behavior won’t be tolerated, it’s that the NFL’s own moral character is on the line. When FIFA, the world-governing body for soccer, placed the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, despite major concerns about workers’ rights (which have been validated in no uncertain terms), they signaled that they think it’s okay to engage with Qatar. But this isn’t just a signal, they revealed what they think is okay, and in doing so they blotted their own moral character. So, the Browns have blotted their own moral copybook by signing Watson, and the NFL blots its copybook by allowing him to play.

We can bolster this argument with one final important point: the fans are disgusted. Of course, some fans don’t care, some fans are willing to overlook this behavior. But many are appalled that the Browns have signed Watson and do not want him to play for the organization. Diehard Browns fan Robyn Lockher put the point forcefully:

It’s very difficult as a woman to love and support the team you grew up with, that’s been a family tradition your whole life, when it just feels like you’re not being respected or taken seriously by the organization at all.” She thinks Watson could have taken them to the Super Bowl, but thinks it isn’t worth it: :It’s just a shame we sold our soul to Deshaun Watson.

Fans want their teams to be the sort of thing they can respect, not employers of rapists or supporters of human rights abuses. And that solidifies the argument for why Watson should be banned:

we expect our sports and our teams to be morally decent and to care about where they spend their money and who they platform.

And we don’t just want our side to win, we want them to win in the right way, with players we can love and respect. That’s the point of these major sports institutions – the leagues and the teams – and when they fail to hit the standards fans expect they thwart the enjoyment they are supposed to provide.

Finally, I want to go over two potential rebuttals. Firstly, it’s worth noting the possibility of a mistake. The soccer player Ched Evans was found not guilty of rape on appeal after spending time in prison. This certainly does not show us that he had done nothing morally wrong, but it does open the possibility that some people will be credibly accused of a crime or a moral wrongdoing and not in fact have done it.

So, what should we do in those cases? Well, if an injustice is discovered, we should work to remedy it. But some injustices will be undiscovered, some good people will be banned while having done nothing wrong. My position is that it is a cost worth bearing. The alternative is to let rapists and abusers soak in the adoration of thousands of fans. The message that sends, what that indicates, might be more harmful than the possibility that someone unjustly has their career cut short.

Secondly, we need to be clear that this position does not undercut the possibility of redemption. On the one hand, we might think that even if a player is convicted and serves a sentence, we should allow them to reintegrate into society. America does a very bad job of this: it has high recidivism rates, people often struggle to find a job upon release, and many felons cannot even engage in the political system by voting after their release. Allowing sportspeople to return to a position of prominence once they have completed their sentences might be an important message against this punitive system.

But that doesn’t apply in our cases. Employing a sexual harasser who denies it, cheering for a rapist, idolizing a man who would assault his girlfriend and leave her bleeding – this is what we should seek to prevent. But were these figures to be found guilty, serve their time, and then reform, we would be dealing with a very different sort of case. One in which a person has shown that they recognize that what they have done is wrong. Though there may still be good arguments against allowing reformed abusers to compete, the argument above applies with less force: we would not be employing merely a wrongdoer, we would be supporting a wrongdoer who has shown us that they can recognize this wrongdoing and attempt to live their life in a better way. The moral story there is much more complicated.

Sexual Violence in the Metaverse: Are We Really “There”?

photograph of woman using VR headset

Sexual harassment can take many forms, whether in an office or on social media. However, there might seem to be a barrier separating “us” as the user of a social media account, from “us” as an avatar or visual representation in a game since the latter is “virtual” whereas “we” are “real.” Even though we are prone to experience psychological and social damage to our virtual representations, it seems that we cannot – at least directly – be affected physically. A mean comment may hurt my feelings and change my mood – I  might even get physically ill – but no direct physical damage seemed possible. Until now.

Recently, a beta tester of Horizon Worlds – a VR-based platform of Meta – reported that a stranger “simulated groping and ejaculating onto her avatar.” Even more recently, additional incidents, concerning children, have been reported. A safety campaigner stated that “He has spoken to children who say they were groomed on the platform and forced to take part in virtual sex.” The same article talks about howa “researcher posing as a 13-year-old girl witnessed grooming, sexual material, racist insults and a rape threat in the virtual-reality world.” How should we understand these virtual assaults? While sexual harassment requires no physical presence, when we attempt to consider whether such actions represent a kind of physical violence, things get complicated as the victim has not been violated in the traditional sense.

This problem has been made more pressing by the thinning of the barrier that separates what is virtual from what is physical. Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Meta, has emphasized the concept of “presence” as “one of the basic concepts” of Metaverse. The goal is to make the virtual space as “detailed and convincing” as possible. In the same video, some virtual items are designed to give a “realistic sense of depth and occlusion.” Metaverse attempts to win the tech race by mimicking the physical sense of presence as much as possible.

The imitation of the physical sense of presence is not a new thing. Many video games also develop  a robust sense of  presence. Especially in mmo (massive multiplayer online) games, characters can commonly touch, push, or persistently follow each other, even when it is unwelcomed and has nothing to do with one’s progress in the game. We often accept these actions as natural, as an obvious and basic part of the game’s social interaction. It is personal touches like these that encourage gamers to bond with their avatars. They encourage us to feel two kinds of physical presence: present as a user playing a game in a physical environment, and present as a game character in a virtual environment.

But these two kinds of presence mix very easily, and the difference between a user and the avatar can easily be blurred. Having one’s avatar pushed or touched inappropriately, has very real psychological effects. It seems that at some point, these experiences can no longer be considered as merely “virtual.”

This line is being further blurred by the push toward Augmented Reality (AR) which places “virtual” items in our world, and Virtual Reality (VR) where “this” world remains inaccessible to user during the session. As opposed to classic games’ sense of presence, in AR and VR, we explore the game environment mainly within one sense of presence instead of two, from the perspective of a single body. Contrary to our typical gaming experience, these new environments – like that of the Metaverse – may only work if this dual presence is removed or weakened. This suggests that our experience can no longer be thought of as taking place “somewhere else” but always “here.”

Still, at some level, dual presence remains: When we take our headsets off, “this world” waits for us. And so we return to our main moral question under discussion: Can we identify an action within the embodied online world as physical? Or, more specifically, Is the charge of sexual assault appropriate in the virtual space?

If one’s avatar is taken as nothing but a virtual puppet controlled by the user from “outside,” then it seems impossible to conclude that gamers can be physically threatened in the relevant sense. However, as the barrier separating users from their game characters erodes, the illusion of presence makes the avatar mentally inseparable from the user, experience-wise they become increasingly the same. Since the aim of the Metaverse is to create such a union, one could conclude that sharing the same “space” means sharing the same fate.

These are difficult questions, and the online spaces as well as the concepts which govern them are always in development. However, recent events should be taken as a warning to consider preventive measures, as these new spaces require new definitions, new moral codes, and new precautions.

Chris Cuomo, Brotherhood, and Morality

side-by-side photographs of Andrew and Chris Cuomo

On Thursday, CNN suspended its prime-time news anchor Chris Cuomo “indefinitely, pending further evaluation.” By Saturday, he had been terminated. The move comes shortly after documents revealed a “cozy and improper” relationship between Chris Cuomo and the political aides of his brother, Andrew Cuomo, former governor of New York.

Andrew Cuomo recently resigned as governor amid numerous allegations of sexual misconduct. Shortly before that scandal became public, Chris Cuomo held regular friendly, even comic, interviews with his brother. He also reportedly held “strategic discussions” with his brother about how best to respond to the allegations. A few days ago, the New York attorney general’s office released more documents showing Cuomo used media sources to uncover information about those who were accusing his brother of sexual misconduct. This triggered CNN’s move to suspend the anchor. CNN claimed these documents showed “a greater level of involvement in his brother’s efforts than we previously knew.”

Even before these latest revelations, many of Cuomo’s colleagues regarded his behavior as violating journalistic ethical standards, which aim to maintain a healthy barrier between those who report and those who are being reported upon. “This is a no-brainer,” says Mark Feldstein, chair of the broadcast journalism department at the University of Maryland and former staff member at CNN. “Journalism Ethics 101: journalists should never cover family members. It’s a glaring conflict of interest.” Cuomo himself now calls the discussions with his brother and his aides “inappropriate” and a “mistake.”

There is little dispute that Chris Cuomo’s behavior violated journalistic and impersonal ethical standards in seeking to help his brother. But, and here is the philosophical puzzle, was he, at the same time, also being a good brother? Cuomo explained that he was “family first; job second” and singularly committed to “be there for my family, which I must.” If Cuomo was simply being a good brother, does this mean that being a good brother can conflict with being moral? In such a case, which should we choose? Looking for answers to these questions forces us to take sides in a philosophical debate about the bounds of morality.

As the joke has it, a friend will help you move, but a good friend will help you move a body. But at the heart of the joke is a serious point. Sometimes, as Cuomo has discovered, the demands of morality seem to conflict with the demands that our personal relationships put on us.

Some think that this apparent potential for conflict between the demands of morality and those of our personal relationships is just an illusion. Regarding friendship, Aristotle thought that good friends take an interest in their friends’ moral development. We want our friends to be better people — the best versions of themselves. A good friend wouldn’t help you to indulge in immoral behavior or to avoid facing the consequences. A good friend would encourage you to face up to what you ought to do. We might think the same about Cuomo. Perhaps a good brother would not help his sibling to navigate a series of sexual misconduct allegations. Perhaps, then, Cuomo was being both unethical and a bad brother. On this view, there is no real conflict of values. The standards of both morality and brotherhood condemn Chris Cuomo’s behavior.

But this Aristotelian approach is arguably an overly moralized conception of friendship, or, in our case, brotherhood. Contrary to the Aristotelian view, it certainly seems possible for good friends to not particularly care about each other’s moral development. Imagine two kids who enjoy getting into mischief together. The Aristotelian view implies that they simply aren’t good friends, but that doesn’t seem correct. So perhaps the Aristotelian view is false and there really is a tension between the demands of morality and those of our personal relationships.

So, we’re back to the idea that there is a genuine conflict between being a good brother and a morally good person. Let’s examine that apparent conflict more closely.

We generally think morality is impartial. When something is the moral thing to do, it’s the moral thing to do for everybody. At least, this is what the two most famous moral theories — Kantianism and Utilitarianism — claim. According to Kant, we’re acting morally so long as we’re treating peoples’ humanity not merely as a means, but (also) as an end. According to Utilitarianism, we’re acting morally so long as our actions produce the best outcome of the available options. These are both wholly impartial theories of morality. Everyone counts the same as everyone else. It doesn’t matter who the person in front of you is, or what your relationship with them is; morally, you just treat them the same as anyone else!

On the other hand, the demands of friendship and family are clearly not impartial. If you are a good friend, the fact that your friend is your friend means you will treat her better than you would a stranger. We often think we shouldn’t treat our friends or family just like we treat everyone else. So, the conflict between morality and friendship/family can be thought of as a conflict between acting impartially and morally, on the one hand, and acting partially, in favor of our friends and family, on the other.

Here is another reason to think there is, contrary to appearances, no real conflict between morality and brotherhood. We might be going wrong in thinking of morality as totally impersonal. Maybe the partial demands of friendship and family are genuine moral demands too. This idea is called “moral pluralism.”

Moral pluralists agree that the impersonal values that morality generally focuses upon — such as promoting general well-being — are important moral values. But they don’t think they are the only important moral values. According to the moral pluralist, Cuomo didn’t face a conflict between the demands of brotherhood and those of morality. Instead, the value pluralist would say Cuomo faced a conflict within morality, between two important moral values — of impersonal morality and of brotherhood. This provides a very different picture of Cuomo’s dilemma.

On this moral pluralist view, Chris Cuomo had good moral reasons to try to help his brother. He also had good moral reasons to maintain his distance and journalistic independence. This leaves us with a difficult question; which should he have done? Here, the moral pluralist faces the task of weighing these reasons against each other to form an overall, all-things-considered judgment.

The kind of dilemma Cuomo faced, between taking particular care of those you are closest to or living up to impersonal ethical standards, is not rare. The same (apparent) conflict can be found in choosing whether to donate to an effective charity or buy a Christmas present for someone you love, or choosing whether to let your friend copy your answers in a school test. These apparent dilemmas force us to confront some particularly tricky philosophical puzzles — puzzles about the nature of friendship, of familial bonds, and which values we include in our conception of morality.

Hollywood Structures: The Age Gap in Relationships

A photo of the Hollywood sign at sunset.

Recently, it was reported that 31-year-old rapper Drake shut down a restaurant in Washington D.C. to take 18 year-old model Bella Harris on a date. And while the pair has denied that a date occurred (Harris doing so on Instagram, saying she had been in New York), Harris also has posted an image on Instagram of the pair embracing with the caption “no place I’d rather be ” While Harris is at the legal age of consent, the pair first met when Harris was 16 years old. And rumors of the two dating become more alarming when looking at some of the pictures she also posted on her Instagram after their first meeting.

Continue reading “Hollywood Structures: The Age Gap in Relationships”

Are Zero Tolerance Policies the Solution to Sexual Misconduct?

A photo of Senator Al Franken.

This year’s headlines have been dominated by sexual assault and harassment allegations against powerful, wealthy politicians and prominent figures in the entertainment industry.  In many ways, this is old news—people in positions of power have always used that power to sexually exploit and harass those in less powerful positions.  The difference is, until recently, these figures seemed too big to fall.  

Continue reading “Are Zero Tolerance Policies the Solution to Sexual Misconduct?”