Maybe the NFL isn’t the tobacco industry, after all

The NFL has been compared in congressional hearings to the tobacco industry for its insistence that concussions, like tobacco, aren’t bad for you. My colleague, Jack Marshall has gone so far as to write, harshly but sensibly, that even watching NFL games is unethical.

Now the league is finally starting to take seriously the problem of players returning to action too soon after suffering concussions. Today’s New York Times reports that the NFL will require players who have suffered head injuries to be cleared by an independent neurologist before returning to play. It’s not a complete solution, but it’s an important second step. (The first step was recognizing the league’s own responsibility for the situation.) Perhaps colleges and high schools will begin to do the same.

Sotomayor, New Haven, Affirmative Action, and Ethics

The hubbub over the Sotomayor nomination, and over her support of New Haven's action in the firefighter case, got me thinking about the ethics of affirmative action. It was surely right for New Haven to not base firefighter promotions on a race-biased test, and surely right to grant Mr Ricci, the dyslexic firefighter, a promotion after he had studied hard and passed the exam.

But the city couldn't do both right things. Ethics is more often a struggle between right and right, than a straightforward choice between right and wrong.

My ideal affirmative action is the path the National Football League chose several; years ago. The owners saw that they headed an organization in which most of the players were balck and all the coaches were white. Their solution? They mandated for themselves that they would interview at least one black candidate for every head coaching vacancy.

A virtuous circle ensued: Since they had to interview a black candidate they started to think about who was the best to interview. They found that--in some instances--the black candidate was the best, and they hired him. In the ten years since the policy was implemented the 32 NFL teams have hired ten black coaches.

What's the lesson? Simply that the owners--mostly people of good will--decided that they didn't want to have an organization that was all white at the toop and mostly black at the bottom: it wasn't ethical. And they fixed it with outreach and without lowering their standards or favoring hiring anybody because of race.