In some, why do we think gambling might? Why might gambling be a bad thing? And we've seen a number of different arguments raised here, but we maybe could summarize this with the following points. So part of the risk is part of the point about the discouragement of gambling is the risk of financial ruin that the person might be ruined. And those people who depend on an individual, family, friends might also be ruined by the ruin of the gambler. So that may be one reason why gambling is a bad thing. But even if it doesn't and in ruin, it might just be a waste of time. It's an unproductive activity. It's poorly worth bearing in mind that many of these prohibitions of gambling from a time when people needed to work either in the fields where bringing in the harvest was the difference between living or starving. Or where people worked in industrial context, where people need to go to factories to make things that were necessary to keep body and soul together to manufacture clothing, to manufacture hardware products that could be used to build houses and so forth. And in our world where most of our economic activities are actually involved in providing services for each other and to a large extent of providing entertainment for each other, perhaps the the attitude towards gambling might be thought to be different today. Of course, gambling is thought to encourage poor character traits, so greed, indifference to others. And that's kind of interesting idea, the idea that winning involves losing as well, and that winners should not be so smug and should actually have concern about the consequences for losers. That's kind of interesting thought and something worth bearing in mind. Another interesting avenue of the disapproval of gambling is the idea that it involves excessive risk taking, particularly striking today where governments are actually very keen to encourage us to take risks. They see an entrepreneurial society as being in some sense a good thing. People are encouraged to invest in the stock market, which bears a lot of similarities with gambling. And so again, perhaps our attitudes towards some of these things are changing in terms as a result of our economic circumstances. And but though particularly I think you come back time again to the adverse impact that gambling can have, particularly people with low incomes. If it diverts money that would otherwise go into purchasing things that we might consider necessary, then gambling clearly could be thought to be harmful. Sometimes people describe lottery tickets which has been a very popular way for governments to raise money in recent years. They've described this as a tax on stupidity. And whatever you think of other people's intellectual capacity, taxing people because they're stupid doesn't sound like a very enlightened policy. What about sports gambling? Well, there are all those arguments might apply in relation to sports gambling, but they're also worth bearing in mind. The other arguments, the most important one probably is that it might encourage match fixing that gamblers might try to bribe either players or referees, umpires, match officials to fix the game in order to profit from the results. The evidence of match fixing is somewhat mix, and we'll talk about that later. But certainly that's a very widespread concern that gambling might encourage match fixing. That may be the case, although whether that's really the issue here, one issue is whether gambling should be illegal or legal. If gambling on sports is illegal, gambling on sports will still take place. There's a lot of evidence to support that, and illegal gambling seems more likely to create match fixing than legal gambling. There's also the argument that gambling just simply undermine security of sport. Sport is something that should be played for its own sake. That view probably sounds a little old fashioned these days given the extent of commercialism in sport. It was a view that was very popular once upon a time, and there's still many people I think, who believe that that's true. But it's hard to square with the extent of commercialism and the amount of profit that is generated by sports generally these days. In the end, there has to be a balancing many people like gambling. It's many people think it's a fun thing to do. So, that need not necessarily weigh in the balance or need not outweigh at least the concerns. Depending on the harms that are created, many ethical systems really have developed an accommodation with gambling and said, well, under the right circumstances gambling can be okay. It's quite uncommon, I suppose these days to see an unqualified opposition to gambling although we've seen certainly, for example, in the case of Islam, we've seen the outright prohibition is still part of their system. So in conclusion, we can say that most ethical systems take a pretty dim view of gambling. But generally the case is that it's discouraged rather than prohibited with one or two exceptions. The discouragement stems from the fact that is both seen as being an unproductive activity, but also because of the harm that it's caused to individuals and individuals and people related to those individuals, particularly other family members. And certainly one might think that even if you think that gambling should be legal, it may be one would use these moral systems in order to form a basis for regulation. That's certainly the principle behind a utilitarian framework. But one might think whatever one's ethical views, one should use those ethical views to inform policy and the ways in which gambling should be regulated.
