Why am I drawing the line between legal and illegal activities? Really? Is there a State approved 100 dollar Hobo Fights organization I'm somehow unaware of? Between back-alley beatings and events with medical personnel present where the referee is often also a trained medic and required to intervene in truly excessive situations?
I'm not asking your opinion on legality. Different types of fighting are legal in some places but not in others.
If there's medical personnel involved to prevent instant death, you think it is
ethically acceptable to pay two consenting adults to cause permanent damage to each other's brains? Say, by giving them baseball bats and letting them go at it till one of them stops moving? If not, why not, and
why should that same ethical principle not apply to other fighting sports? The underlined is the question I'm really asking here
but as long as you're playing by the rules you're not a piece of shit for knocking someone out, and your fans aren't pieces of shit for enjoying that.
See, I think this is two different questions. Someone taking an irresistible amount of money by wagering his long term health against someone else's is perhaps misguided, but is not (necessarily) engaging in an unethical practice. Irresistible means irresistible, after all.
The people
paying him the money to do so are in a different ethical position. They are making a choice to see people deliberately destroy each other for nothing more than an hour's amusement. That certainly does seem to be in ethically depraved territory.
They don't all have zero empathy for the guy on the ground, they aren't morally bankrupt, or tacitly endorsing "bloodsport" (well okay, technically I'd say the UFC may count but back to hockey it's not bloodsport just because somebody got rocked).
Posting "good clean hit" doesn't make you a maniac, nor does marveling at just how completely peppered Slavin was. You don't see it often.
Again I would regard hockey* as a different story. There are definitely shithead players out there who take advantage of opportunities to hurt people, but in general the physicality in hockey is pretty straight-up and there are explicit rules to prevent head injuries. From time to time guys will still get hit in the head with slapshots, but that doesn't make slapshots inherently bad. It's no different than how from time to time a basketball player takes a hard foul and hits his head, or a baseball player collides with the catcher's kneepad while sliding in head-first. It happens occasionally as a natural consequence, but not regularly by deliberate design.
* hockey meaning the game of hockey, within the rules, which this hit was. The commercialized version of hockey where players are instructed to physically destroy each other by playing deliberately outside the rules, that's a different story. This is the whole issue with stage fighting.
