Free Markets (8) - Football Analogy

If you can understand a football game, you can understand a market. It is just a group of people interacting in a different way. A football game is not a moral entity, but is an activity where people interact with each other. The decisions about what happens in the game are made by the people participating in it: players, owners, managers, referees.

People get hurt playing football, but I cannot say that I was injured by a game of football. Rather I was hurt by colliding with someone or falling heavily to the ground. It may have been deliberate, or it may have been accidental.

There are several people or groups of people that might be morally responsible for my (hypothetical) football injury:

• The players who tackled me have been malicious and vindictive. They may have struck me in a way that breaks the rules of the game. One may have had an iron bar hidden under his uniform.
• The people running the game could be responsible. They might be dishonest or wicked. They might have set the rules, so that more people get hurt, but this is quite unlikely. The people organising and controlling the game do make conscious decisions, so they are morally responsible for the consequences of their decisions.
• An evil spirit may have tapped my foot, so that I fell awkwardly. Spirits are moral beings.
• I have to take some responsibility for my injury, because I chose to play a high risk sport. I could have chosen to play tiddlywinks. It would have been safer, but might be boring.
• The most likely reason for the injury is that several players, all playing hard and all abiding by the rules, collided and I got hurt. The players that hit me committed no sin. When I entered the collision, I was uncertain about the outcome. I assumed that I would be fine, so I took the risk. My injury was an accident, with no one directly responsible.

A bald statement that I was injured by the game makes no sense. The football game does not have moral responsibility, because it cannot make decisions. A football game does not think or decide. It cannot say, "I am going to injure the running back today."

When a footballer player is injured, another player, a referee or an administrator might be responsible. However, an injury is usually the result of a series of action by several people leading to an outcome that know one foresaw. If these people had perfect knowledge of the future, they would have done something different. In this situation, no one is morally responsible except the person who chose to put themselves in a situation where an injury could occur. No one can be blamed except the injured player.