Looking Back: The Ethics of Gambling

From April 1975

By Professor William Barclay

Gambling is one of the oldest and the most universal of human amusements. Dice have been found dating back to very nearly 2000BC.

In the 5th Century, Isocrates was complaining about the number of young men who spent their time and money in gambling dens.

Suetonius tells of Nero playing at dice for bet of £4000 per point.

Tacitus tells us that among the German tribes, there were those with such a passion for gambling that “when all else is lost they stake their personal liberty on the last and final throw, so that the loser faces voluntary slavery”.

CHURCH GAMBLERS

Gambling had even got its grip on members of the Christian Church, for Tertullian writes in the 3rd Century: “If you say you are a Christian, when you say you are a dice player, you say you are what you are not, because you are a partner with the world.”

Gambling is something common to every society and to every generation. Wherein then lies its universal attraction?

1.      There is the excitement which gambling lends to life, the thrill of staking everything on the turn of a card or the fall of a dice; the excitement of waiting for the result of a game or a race on which a bet has been placed. Uncertainty always means excitement, and where the uncertainty is linked to the possibility of profit, the excitement is greatly increased.

2.      There is the human desire to get something for nothing, and gambling offers the possibility of large profit for no effort.

3.      This is linked with two other things. Gambling offers the possibility of security or of escape.

The working man has always been faced with the living of life in unpleasant surroundings with a few of the luxuries and the good things of life; and worse, he has always been subject to the threat of unemployment, during which even the standards which he has succeeded in achieving may be lost. If he could only somehow possess himself of a large sum of money, he could escape from his grim environment; he could get for himself some of the luxuries of life; and above all, he could be free from the haunting insecurity which continually threatens him.

I personally have no doubt that it was the desire for security and the hope of escape from industrial uncertainty which gave the football pools their attraction in the early days.

4.      Closely allied with that, there is the situation in which our present taxation system places us. If a man made £24,000 in any one year by ordinary business methods would have to pay about £18,000 of it in tax; if he made £100,000 he would have to pay about £86,000 in tax.

In other words, we have got into a topsy-turvy system in which gambling presents the only way to real wealth. We live in a system which encourages the gambler and discourages the earner.

5.      Allied with the excitement angle of gambling, there is the matter of involvement. The ordinary man will never be wealthy enough to own a racehorse for himself, but, if he has a bet on a horse, there is a sense in which for that race the horse becomes his. The ordinary man will never be good enough to play first league football, but, if he has a bet on a team, he is intimately bound up wit the fortunes of that team. His bet, his gamble, has involved him personally in the contest.

Well, then, what is wrong with all this? First of all, let us glance at the extent of this thing. In 1973 punters laid a record of £2,826,675,000 in bets, and the figures for 1974 are likely to break that record and exceed £3000 million. £1000 million was taken I betting shops alone; and the Treasury raked in a sum of £226, 134, 000 in taxes on betting.

On any grounds this is a very considerable element in the national life and economy. Lord Beaconsfield referred to it as “a vast engine of national demoralisation”.

UNPRODUCTIVE

Before we begin to criticise gambling, it would be well to have a definition of it. In the Dictionary of Christian Ethics (edited by John Macquarrie and published by the SCM Press) E Rogers begins the article on gambling with the following definition: “Gambling may be defined as the determination of the possession of money or money-values, by the appeal to an artificially created chance, where the gains of the winners are made up at the expense of the losers, and the gain is secured without rendering in service or in value and equivalent of the gain obtained.”

In the article on gambling in the Hastings Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, the following charges are made against gambling.

1.      Gambling is unproductive. Money is spent and nothing either in goods or services is produced. Money is therefore wasted because it has produced nothing of use or value. It is laid down that there are three ways only in which money may be properly obtained. It may be obtained by gift, in a situation in which the gift may be the result of admiration or affection, or the result of charity at the sight of need. It may be obtained by labour in a situation in which it is the produce of honest and efficient diligence and toil, and in which it will quite certainly be the product of some useful service to the community. It may be obtained by exchange, in a situation in which something of value is given in exchange for the money received, whether in service or in goods. Money gained and lost in gambling fulfils none of these conditions.

2.      Gambling is anti-social. Herbert Spencer said that gambling “is a kind of action by which pleasure is obtained  at the cost of pain to another. The happiness of the winner implies the misery of the loser”. Gambling is therefore ‘antisocial, egoistic, deteriorative of character, and intrinsically savage”.

3.      Gambling is a deliberate appeal to the instinctive covetousness which lurks in the heart of every man. It is an invitation to try to get something for nothing, to live in plenty without working for it.

ADDICTIVE

4.      Gambling makes chance the dominating factor in life. Life ought to be founded on reason, because man is characteristically a reasonable being, but gambling makes reward depend on chance, and therefore literally makes a nonsense of life.

5.      Gambling contradicts the whole idea of stewardship. If it is true, as the Christian etic holds, that we have in stewardship from God, then all that we possess must be used as God would use it, for the good of the community, and the gambler certainly does not use his possessions, and he does not help other to use theirs, for the general good of the community. The practice of gambling and the exercise of stewardship cannot go hand in hand.

6.      Gambling is addictive. It may begin as a pleasant and occasional thrill; it has a very good chance of finishing as a compulsion. The odds are always against the gambler. He therefore gambles and loses and gambles again to recoup his losses, and he is launched on a slope that will rush him to disaster.

Someone who worked in the catering industry told me that the women she employed in the kitchen, the cleaners, the dishwashers, the waitresses, were unanimous that they would rather that their husbands drank than that they gambled. The man who drank might come home drunk on payday; the man who gambled had a fair chance of coming home penniless, having gambled away his entire wage packet. Gambling, for those who are characteristically its victims, has a drug -like addictive quality.

DANGEROUS

It is clear in the broad issue betting and gambling in the usual senses of the terms are dangerous, and even potentially ruinous, activities. But in discussions about gambling certain special issues often provoke discussion.

There is the matter of insurance. Some very scrupulous persons feel that to take out insurance is to gamble. But insurance is a contract entered into after the most careful and scientific calculation of statistical probabilities, which is very different from making something dependant on the fall of a dice or the turn of a card.

In insurance I admit that something is statistically likely to happen to me, and I take prudent steps to protect myself and others against the results of it.

There are those who feel that all dealing in stocks and shares is gambling. It may and may not be. Suppose someone known to me has invented or acquired a process which is likely to meet a public need or demand. Suppose this person has no money of his own wherewith to develop or to market this process and its products. Then suppose that I and others have money which is idle. Because we have confidence in the new process, and in the man who owns it. Because we have confidence in the new process, and in the man who owns it, we provide the money for the process to be used and for its products to be marketed. Then we will expect, if the enterprise is successful to reap a reward. This is not to gamble; it is to back someone’s informed judgement of someone else’s enterprise.

There is what in some ways the most difficult argument of all to meet. What harm is there in a man making bet of a few pence, the loss of which he can well afford? To this there apply exactly the same principals as apply to any act of gambling. It is an attempt in principal to get something for nothing; for the gambler to win someone else will have to lose; because of the addictive quality of gambling the small beginning could be the first step to real addiction.

There was a time when it was common for Church organisations to run raffles, lotteries and the like. In the case of the Church it seems to me not so much wrong as degrading that the Church should have to raise money in such a way, and that the Church has to assume that its members will not give to it unless they have the chance of making something out of the giving.

Whatever may be permissible for the world, there are things which it should be beneath the spirit of the Church to touch.

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