It's up to the referee. UFC fighters get half their money as a win bonus, and the lower ranked fighters on the card can be earning 6k show, 6k win, fighting 3 or 4 times a year. With the costs of training, sports nutrition etc etc, that win bonus can be the difference between feeding their family or not, and many of them come from poor backgrounds so know what that feels like. A fighter isnt going to take that chance and stop when the referee hasnt stepped in, and give their opponent oppertunity to recover.

There have been a few cases where someone looked out, the fighter stopped throwing punches, and got knocked out themselves. That's why it's common to keep going until the ref stops the fight.

That’s not how it works. There are plenty of examples where a fighter faked being hurt or they recovered quickly . “Obviously out” is very rare.

This may be different than being out, but I also don't think it's rare to see a fighter only make glancing blows at a downed opponent. Sometimes it's obvious they don't actually try and hit hard at that point any more, and are rather avoiding making real blows at a defenceless opponent, although they do obviously want to secure the win so they don't just stop in their tracks.

>they have no business learning martial arts

Let's not fool ourselves. They are mainly prize fighters, despite the "martial arts" name of the sport.

Big armchair energy on this one. In practice in a high stakes high adrenaline competition neither party is very able to keep track of their opponent's (or sometimes even their own!) physical & mental state with this degree of finesse.

Combat sports are an ancient discipline existing across distinct and varied human cultures and every mature form acknowledges this constraint by having a third party to referee the match.

If they want to call it "combat sports" then that's fine. If they want to call it "martial arts", then part of that title is self control. Any of the times that I've fought I was expected to be in control of myself and stop if necessary.

Well the discipline is referred to as "mixed martial arts" AKA MMA. And the relevant definition of "martial" is "of, relating to, or suited for war or a warrior".

I'm not sure your distinction has any material significance here. As others have pointed out, the referee is there to stop the fight and the fighters are trained to continue until the such a time.

Yeah. In war it's either you kill or you will be killed, so what do you expect in something that is meant to simulate that.

In war there are rules of engagement. Finishing off a downed enemy is a war crime.

To people that train there is a clear distinction between "martial arts" and not martial arts. You can put away your dictionary.

Where do you train that they don't consider mma martial arts.

Yeah sensei, you're expected to stop when necessary. You're not expected to determine when it is necessary to stop, that responsibility falls on the referee during competition.

It's a split second decision, pretty difficult to stop a combination in the middle. Also as others have noted there's many examples of fighters coming back to win after flash knockouts.

Fighters often do stop, an example from just last week is Bahamondes vs Giagos (although this is probably not a good example of avoiding concussion).

https://youtu.be/X2Z1En-eAgk?si=8lBY27afFMfv_Z90

But there's many, many examples of fighters stopping when they know their opponent is finished, and IMO only very few examples of fighters egregiously not stopping.