Comment by jstanley
18 days ago
Some people want to gamble and the gambling industry provides what they want.
How would you like it if people who didn't care about your hobby started questioning the social benefit of allowing you to do it?
18 days ago
Some people want to gamble and the gambling industry provides what they want.
How would you like it if people who didn't care about your hobby started questioning the social benefit of allowing you to do it?
> How would you like it if people who didn't care about your hobby started questioning the social benefit of allowing you to do it?
In this hypothetical scenario, is my hobby actively harmful to society?
Some people would enjoy killing people but we don’t let them do that.
Gambling isn't harmful to society. A gambling bet is a private bet between two people.
If some people who like gambling are harmful to society in other areas of their life, that's on them.
Gambling can absolutely destroy lives. I've seen it in my own family. Its highly addictive nature combined with an easy way to lose everything you own is incredibly dangerous.
I've personally witnessed domestic violence from a gambler taking heavy losses as they realize they're about to be in a really bad place financially. I've never seen someone get violent over messing up a few rows of knitting.
2 replies →
Maybe I enjoy having an arsenal of late-model machine guns, doing research on rare nuclear isotopes, brewing cholera in my septic tank, tending a Japanese knotwood garden, raising lantern flies, and breeding new strains of cold viruses.
Perhaps society should continue to restrain such hobbies.
Those are all good examples of things that you could in principle do without harming other people, so I don't see your point.
Yes, you should be allowed to do those things as long as you do it without harming others.
If a lot of people have that as their hobby, and some are careless or malicious, people will be harmed. Now suppose that it's not simple to stop the offenders directly. Instead, restricting the sale of nuclear isotopes or cholera samples would probably be highly effective.
What is the point of being this obtuse? Is there a rhetorical benefit to pretending that gambling is not a vice? That it is just a "hobby"? Should we apply this logic to selling illegal drugs?
>How would you like it if people who didn't care about your hobby started questioning the social benefit of allowing you to do it?
Gambling? Is people questioning gambling a new thing? Seems like the opposite is the case. Again, this is where being purposefuly obtuse gets us.
> Should we apply this logic to selling illegal drugs?
Yes, of course.
Selling drugs is also a private transaction between two people that does no harm to anyone else.
If the people buying or selling drugs are harmful to others in the rest of their life, that's on them. It shouldn't be used as a fig leaf to negatively impact people who can buy and sell drugs responsibly.