Adults are entitled to decide how to spend their own money

The argument

Opponents of a ban argue from the principle that competent adults may make their own choices about their own resources, including choices others regard as unwise. People spend money on alcohol, expensive hobbies, holidays they cannot quite afford and speculative investments, and we do not take the existence of imprudent spending as a reason to prohibit the category. Opponents hold that gambling is entitled to the same treatment: the great majority of those who bet do so within their means, for entertainment, and stop. The argument stresses that a ban is addressed to everyone in order to reach a minority. Where most participants are unharmed, a prohibition removes a legitimate pleasure from millions to protect a few, and does so by overriding their judgement about their own lives rather than by helping those actually in difficulty. Opponents argue that this is both disproportionate and condescending, and that it is applied selectively to the pastimes of people with less money while equivalent risk-taking by the wealthy is called investment. Opponents add that the harm itself is usually not caused by gambling alone. Problem gambling is bound up with poverty, debt, isolation and untreated mental illness, and a ban addresses none of these. Treatment, debt relief and genuine alternatives help the people in trouble; prohibition simply removes an activity from everyone, including those for whom it was a modest and chosen pleasure. Because adults are entitled to decide how to spend their own money and a ban punishes the many to address the circumstances of a few, this argument concludes, gambling should not be banned.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Proponents of a ban reply that the appeal to free choice assumes a judgement the product is designed to override, since gambling machines and apps are built around reinforcement schedules tested to sustain play past the point a person intended to stop. They add that the losses do not stay with the chooser: household money, children's provision and concealed debt mean partners and dependants bear consequences they never consented to, which is the standard ground for restricting an activity.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The liberty claim assumes the choice is comparable to the others listed, and the opposing case is that gambling products are designed to defeat the judgement the premise relies on. An entitlement to spend unwisely is not an entitlement against being engineered into spending. [Rejecting P2] A large majority is asserted without measure, and the claim that most gamblers come to no harm does not meet the objection, because revenue concentrated among heavy losers means the majority's entertainment is not what sustains the industry. [Rejecting P3] Attributing the minority's difficulties to poverty, debt and untreated illness leaves out the product, which the premise assumes plays no causal part. It is also an argument about whether a ban would work rather than for the entitlement it is offered to support.