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Why The Return of Conor McGregor Is Morally Wrong
Last November the UFC star was fined $1,116 for punching a man in the face, ten weeks later he’s paid $3 million to do it again.
When I was thirteen years old I was part of a taekwondo martial arts club. I wasn’t very good at it, but I enjoyed trying to master skills that could potentially protect me from harm - protect being the key word. I didn’t ever think about using the skills that I had learnt in the gym to inflict needless harm on another human being and, as far as I could tell, neither did any of the other people that I trained with. My taekwondo instructor would reiterate the importance of this point at the end of every session we had:
“All martial arts are to be approached with respect and used with extreme caution. The skills that you learn are intended to promote peace, not inflict violence.”
Additionally, our instructor made sure to remind us that if any of us were found to have violated this moral code, we would not have been welcome back at the gym.
Back then I was merely a skinny thirteen year old boy, with no more than one hundred pounds on my wiry frame - I wasn’t about to go Jean Claude Van Damme on the world, hitting everyone that I saw with a spinning head-kick, but that was…
