ABSTRACT
As demonstrated by the World Medical Association’s (WMA’s) declaration against boxing – passed at its Thirty-Fifth Assembly of October 1983 – the medical profession’s case against boxing is succinct and powerful: ‘Unlike other sports, the basic intent of boxing is to produce bodily harm in the opponent. Boxing can result in death and produces an alarming incidence of chronic brain injury.’ Accordingly, although a number of other sporting activities involve enhanced physical risks, an influential lobby within the medical profession deem boxing a special case, justifying the strictest attention and restriction, because, crudely, the nature of the sport ‘implies that extra points are given for brain damage’.1 The WMA’s declaration prompts four points of interest, which are applied in this chapter to the legal and sporting circumstances pertaining in contemporary British boxing. First, given the injurious nature of boxing, and especially professional boxers’ susceptibility to chronic brain trauma, the facilitation and supervision of boxing by physicians must be considered problematical, and the ethical conundrum facing ‘ringside’ physicians needs to be confronted. It must also be considered in light of the fact that if a national medical association prohibits its members from supervising at bouts, the sport is effectively banned in that jurisdiction. Second, and more broadly, what is the basic ‘intent’ or nature of boxing? Is it as transparently aggressive as some in the medical profession claim? Is the infliction of violence the sole intrinsic element of the sport or does that perspective misunderstand and dismiss the sport’s nuanced levels of discipline, skill and courage? Third, and with the ‘danger’ and ‘intent’ of boxing in mind, do enough satisfactory moral reasons exist to justify calls for the sport’s criminalisation? In this philosophical and criminological inquiry into society’s, and semble the law’s, tolerance of boxing, three distinctive theoretical approaches are considered: liberalism, the more conservative agenda of the legal paternalist and the concept of legal moralism. Finally, any proposed prohibition on professional boxing would incite a number of practical repercussions, principal among them being that the sport would probably continue to operate underground in an unlicensed and more dangerous form. All of these factors are taken into account in assessing whether
the moral boundaries of the criminal law should be extended to encompass the proscription of professional boxing.
