The moral responsibilities of fandom

Using American football as a point of entry, I approach harmful sports from the perspective of fans’ roles and responsibilities. Given that sports’ profitability is a significant obstacle to reform and that fans are the economic basis of sports, they are uniquely positioned to press for reforms. I argue that fans are weakly causally responsible for the risks that arise from the sports that they consume. As a result, fans bear a forward-looking collective responsibility to take steps to mitigate football’s unacceptable risks. Fans are to discharge their forward-looking collective responsibility by coordinating a reduction in their consumption until such time as football’s unacceptable risks have been mitigated.