by Murph E.
On Saturday evening, I arrived at the Bell Centre, ready for an evening at the rodeo.
I turned to my friend, and he asked me, “Why did we come here again?”
“I thought you wanted to come,” I told him.
“What? I thought you wanted to come.”
“We need to work on talking through decisions like this a bit better.”
I think I figured out the rodeo, though, in case you ever wondered: A man sits on a bull, which is eventually released from its pen. If you can sit on the bull long enough, stuff blows up. Oh, and if you’re one of the scantily-dressed girls dancing on a platform at the one end of the arena, stuff blows up for you, too.
While I was there, a couple things passed through my mind. The first was my TA-ship. This semester, I’m a TA for Contemporary Moral Issues. The first half of the semester, we were dealing with the issue of the comparative wealth and affluence of people in the West. Now, we’re working on “The Animal Question.” (The text is actually called that.) Namely, we’re talking about what is owed morally to animals.
I always had assumed that they did something terrible to the bulls to make them so jumpy for the purposes of bull-riding, like hitting them or burning them or something like that. Turns out it’s just that he doesn’t like having a guy sitting on him.
The next thing that went through my mind was my thesis. (Go figure.)
My thesis has to do with non-paternalistic justifications for protections in human research, but it is related theoretically to protections in many other fields as well. I noticed that the vast majority of the bull-riders did not wear helmets. They wore cowboy hats. That said, a rather smallish number of them did wear hockey-style helmets.
I wonder if it’s the case that most bull-riders, if you asked them privately, would say that they would prefer to wear helmets, but because of the culture and their public image and the showmanship of the whole thing, there’s pressure on them not to do so.
It might then be justifiable (and non-paternalistic) to make a rule requiring that all bull-riders wear helmets, since that is what they would actually prefer. It’s sort of analogous to how many justify a minimum wage.
