I tend to be libertarian by nature, but in light of the external costs I see being foisted on society by such practices, I'd be against it.
The problem is that while two people can give consent to fight in modern highly regulated, but basically non-lethal (unless there is a tragic accident) fights, I question the ability of people to make good decisions about lethal combat. There are too many factors working against them, not the least of which being potential for prizes, fame and groupies. Worse than that, by far though are the loss of human capital and the attendant external costs that foists onto society and the ancillary impact it seems likely to have on the mass psychology of the culture. So: (A) an individual's consent likely would never be as
rational as I'd want it to be for me to feel comfortable calling it "informed consent" and (B) even if he consents to the loss of his own life in such a rational way, the external costs imposed on society are still an issue (and his rational calculation would never include the costs being born by society as a whole, save perhaps on a deeply discounted basis).
First, young men in particular are hormone addled and stupid. I know that I did not feel completely "mortal" in my teens and twenties. Historically speaking, young men killed other young men all too often for no good reason whatsoever (and
without prizes, money, fame or women coming to the victor)...in many European nations, dueling was once
the leading cause of deaths for young men of the upper classes (which in large part led to its being banned).
Second, as with dueling generally, I question how pervasive it might become. Such a competition might disproportionately attract the stupid and hormone addled competitors. We would need to either place limits on ho might become a gladiator, or we do run some risk of its becoming the new form of dueling, with all its attendant social costs.
Third, do we really expect that the televised death as a popular entertainment would have no cultural/psychological influence on us? They say that you know a culture by the games it plays, but the psychological studies I've read suggest that the interaction is more complex. The culture invents such things, which, in turn, reinforce and heighten those tendencies within the culture that led to the games in the first place. Everyone is a product of the way they were raised, including both those things that one's parents taught and those things we absorb from the culture (including popular entertainments). Joan McCord's "
Some childrearing antecedents of criminal behavior in adult men.," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1979) was able to accurately predict adult criminal behavior based on the environment in which boys raised in 3/4ths of the cases she followed. While violence committed by the parent are likely stronger influences than those observed in the culture, it seems likely that those of a culture have some effect. That effect is likely cumulative over some period of time as the society acclimates itself to the practice (influenced kids of non-influenced parents grow up and have their own kids, who then have both cultural
and parental influences affecting them, then then grow and have their own kids, etc.)
We might as well, at least, work up to human death-matches by legalize dog fighting. After all, those dogs really do want to fight, and there it's just two pieces of property destroying one another for our amusement. One might argue that it's not that the dogs want to fight, but that they are raised in environments that bring out their aggressive tendencies, but I don't personally see how that is any different. People raised in abusive homes where violence was the "go to" solution would be more likely to become gladiators than others...because, again, we are all products of our upbringing.
Or how about this: Suppose I go find a family where a child is dying and they can't pay their medical bills (possibly in a third-world nation). I then agree to pick up the costs of treatment (Hell, I will fly their sick daughter to the U.S. where she can get great care), but the father has agree to allow himself to be torn apart and eaten by lions on national television. It amused the Romans, and the victims did not get nearly so good a deal. The only problem I see with that is that it's not so much of a "sport" as a spectacle, but why limit the right to consent to death to people engaged in sports? That's he may consent to save a sick child (or pay off his gambling debts, or whatever other reason) should be logically irrelevant.
There are, in fact, all sorts of physically degrading/disturbing things that might make for popular entertainment, save that we have banned them. Give an attractive woman a sword and agree to pay her $1 million...if she can escape "The Rape Maze" alive and unspoiled (perhaps we limit that to cable, since we don't want to expose children to that level of sex). We can have game shows with names like: "You Bet Your Body" where the losing contestants lose fingers/hands/feet/limbs or, if they lose during the climax of the show, their organs go to needy donors around the country.
The only downside I see is that some of these may be less cloaked in the comforting veneer of Roman history, and the fact that there's little doubt that future generations will judge us to be psychopaths.
One problem that might take away from the fun, is that I am not sure that the money to be won by contestants on these shows (gladiator or the trivia-whiz-who-has-bet-his-kidneys alike) would be huge. It might be, but (again) western culture has a long history of dueling, where people often killed others for no good reasons at all. We might like to believe that people would be rational and refuse to participate unless the rewards were very good, but that is not the way humans have behaved in the past. To quote something I wrote in a different thread in response to the notion that bringing back gunfights and dueling would be a good idea:
n Spain, at one time, only about 25% of male Spanish nobles were living to the age of 30...and the main cause of death for those nobles over the age of 15 was dueling. The numbers were similarly grim in other European nations. It was then that Catholic Church declared that anyone engaging in a duel would be excommunicated, and a few nations started passing laws making duels illegal (in addition to the existing rules against murder).
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Baron Max said:
What is "minor" to you, might not be "minor" to someone else. It's not your place to make such judgements ...or if it is, it shouldn't be.
Contrary to your view that duels were fought over serious matters, they were often used as cover to take out political opponents, especially here in the U.S. (again, see the life of Alexander Hamilton and his eldest son). They were also fought over matters of philosophical and scientific disagreement...as if a duel is going to resolve a scientific dispute. The literary critic Charles Saint-Beuve was famously challenged to a duel because an author did not like the review he received (when M. Saint-Beuve was asked to choose his weapon, he replied "I choose spelling; you're dead."). Several duels were fought over one person's speculating about the true age of the other (the most famous being the "Petticoat Duel" between Mrs. Elphinstone and Lady Almeria Braddock, since the combatants were women). In fact, virtually any disagreement, no matter how minor, became grounds for a duel, as long as one man felt like fighting (and again, it only takes one, since refusing a duel was the end of one's ability to function in society in those periods when duels were common).
Other notable ridiculous duels include:
- Commodore Barron challenged and killed one of the judges who sat at his court martial (Stephen Decatur).
- Pitt the Younger challenged George Tierney to a duel on the grounds that Tierney suffered from "a want of patriotism."
- In the course of a very technical, legal, dispute over who was the proper inheritor of a piece of land, the courts ruled against the 4th Baron Mohun, who challenged the winner, the Duke of Hamilton. Both men died, prompting yet more legal proceedings amongst Hamilton's heirs over who now owned that land. I stress, though, that even had Baron Mohun won the duel and survived, that would not have made his claim on that land any stronger.
- Kenelm Digby (an Englishman who was traveling in France) fought Mont le Ros over le Ros's suggesting that Charles I (of England) was not a good monarch. (If that stands as a "good duel" then I think that anyone that challenges the efficacy of Administration policy can be forced to fight to the death).
The book entitled Notes on Duels and Duelling: Alphabetically Arranged with a Preliminary Historical Essay by Lorenzo Sabine (1855), has some of my favorites, though:
- One Neopolitan nobleman once fought a duel over the crucial matter of whether Dante was a better poet than Ariosto. The nobleman later admitted on his deathbed that he had never read the works of either.
- A French Knight declared that his lover was more beautiful any Englishwoman. Someone took offense, and the knight was killed in the ensuing duel.
- Two French nobles could not agree on whether the letter embroidered into a piece of cloth was an "X" or a "Y", so they set up a six on six person duel to settle the matter.
- One marquis owed another 15 shillings, admitted that he owed the debt, but challenged the other man to a duel rather than pay, killing the other man.
- A member of Parliament was called "a Jacobite," so dueled and killed the man over the "insult."
- An English nobleman in line for a dukedom challenged a man he had never met before to a duel because he felt "a call" to do so...there was no specific offense.
- An British officer, recounting his combat duty in the American Revolution asserted that the American forces were not cowards. Another British officer took offense, and killed him in a duel for not badmouthing us.
- A member of the House of Commons killed a man because the man's horse walked backwards (i.e. hindquarters first) towards a royal residence, and the man made a quip about the incident.
- A nobleman was killed because he glanced at another nobleman's wife on the street.
- Two barristers met who had never met nor spoken to one another once fought. One challenged the other without giving a reason or allowing the other a chance to apologize for whatever the supposed wrong was, likely because there was none. The second barrister stated openly that his only reason for going through with it was that he'd never be able to live his life (or practice law again) if he declined.
- Two men dueled because they had a disagreement over whether or not "Ireland was a nation easily roused and easily appeased."
- A traveler who has attempted to stop two men from fighting was challenged to a duel for his trouble by one of them.
- A man who referred to "a beggarly corporation" was challenged to a duel by a man who disagreed (this would be Daniel O'Connell, who killed the challenger, d'Esterre, despite d'Esterre's being a notable duelist and O'Connell's never having dueled before).
- A witness in an American trial testified against a criminal, who happened to be a wealthy man, so the criminal killed him on the supposed "field of honor" after his sentence was served.
That book goes on and on.
From what I have read, it seems that the plurality (perhaps majority) of duels were fought over women, and one man's inability to take rejection is not a very compelling reason to kill another man, any more than it is a good reason to kill the woman. Evariste Galois (who, despite his age, laid the foundations of "Galois theory") was (by most accounts) killed in a duel of this sort, in that the ex of the woman he was seeing didn't like the woman seeing anyone new. Galois died at the age of 20, already an acknowledged genius. Who knows what he might have achieved but for the fact that he was pressured into that duel.
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BaronMax said:
A challenge to a duel would not be such a trivial thing ...if one stood a chance of getting killed or maimed. Or are you just that kind of person??? ...and you're projecting that same mentality onto others?
Again, I am assuming that history is a guide to how duels will progress. Historically speaking, the fear of death and maiming did not prevent, for example, artists from trying to kill art critics over "bad" reviews like (to take a real example), "The artist depicted a philosopher trampling oyster shells and a watercolor of his Christ with Angels." (That was the "review" that caused Edouard Manet to fly into a rage and challenge the critic Louis Duranty to a sword fight...a review which seems curiously devoid of criticism, save that Manet thought its tone was hostile.) Also, in a rage or not, once the challenge is issued, neither man can back out without losing face and making himself a permanent pariah.
Plus, see the list above. A number of duels actually were fought for no reason at all, save that one of the men felt like fighting and the other didn't feel he could refuse the challenge and still live in the community. I would submit that "no reason at all" is "not a good reason" in a more or less objective sense. These are not "duels of honor" in most cases, but "duels to settle arguments" or "duels fought because one person was angry or jealous."
As I also noted in that post in the late middle ages/early Elizabethan period, when public executions for trivial offenses became commonplace, the murder and violent crime rates went up (in cities, at least). There are a few possible explanations for that effect (some historians either question how well we know the rates or how well we know the dates when the increasing crime rates started) but there are plenty of historians who believe that life simply seemed "cheap" in a age where people were being hanged, left to starve outside in hanging cages, dipped in pots of boiling water or oil and left to die in public from the wounds for crimes like stealing 5 shillings (or more), excessive begging by the poor, or committing "immoral" acts like buggery or repeated adultery (though how anyone repeats adultery after having their faces permanently mutilated the first time they were caught...).
