Consider casino question’s moral dimension

The proponents of casino gambling would have us believe that the question is purely economic: more jobs and lower taxes. Whether the proliferation of low-wage jobs is economically advantageous, or whether new and uncertain tax revenues from casino gambling will outweigh the additional financial burden placed on state and local government are issues already in dispute. What the proponents have not asked us to think about is the moral dimension of the question, yet this is really the more important one.

In his essay “On Liberty,” which is one of the most vigorous defenses of individual liberty in the English language, the philosopher John Stuart Mill had this to say about casinos: “Fornication … must be tolerated, and so must gambling: but should a person be free to be a pimp, or to keep a gambling house?” Mill thought that everything we do can be located on a spectrum between those acts that are purely self-regarding and those that clearly impinge on the interests of others.

What concerns only me, such as my taste in music, is none of society’s business, and I may play and listen to what I please so long as I do not force it anyone else. If, on the other hand, as a corporate executive I seek to enrich myself by defrauding shareholders, employees, creditors, and the U.S. Treasury, my actions are at the other end of the spectrum, and the liberties that I have taken should be taken away. Mill thought that fornication and gambling between consenting adults belong toward the self-regarding end of the spectrum and therefore have to be tolerated, even if disapproved of. Pimping or keeping a gambling house, he thought, lie right in the middle of the spectrum, “on the exact boundary line” between personal liberty and social control. Whether to tolerate them or prohibit them is therefore harder to decide.

Mill himself seemed to lean toward prohibition on the grounds that the promotion of gambling or prostitution is not simply a private matter. The public may be justified in curtailing the liberty of “instigators,” if it regards these things to be bad. Since the owners of gambling houses are seeking to enrich themselves in ways that do impinge on the interests of others, whether to let them set up shop is fundamentally a moral issue about the social good. Economics and ethics cannot be separated. The question is really whether to legitimate this form of making money. If the question before Maine voters were not casino gambling, but the legalization of bordellos, few would fail to see it as a moral question. Yet, as good a case can be made for the economic benefits of building bordellos as building casinos. And perhaps a better case for doing both, as in Nevada.

There may be good reasons for making moral distinctions between casinos and bordellos as money-making enterprises, although they seem to have much in common. They both, for instance, are blatant forms of exploitation and are associated with increased crime. My point is that, like insider trading, casino gambling is a question of social values, of how one person may be permitted to profit from another. It ought to be openly debated and decided on that basis.

There is one aspect of the economic argument that unequivocally pushes casino gambling far to the social end of Mill’s spectrum, and that is relying on it as a source of public revenue. A poll this summer revealed that support for a casino in Maine would drop significantly if the question were disconnected from the prospect of a kickback for public education and property tax relief.

This is disheartening. It suggests the public’s apparent willingness to be bribed by an industry it otherwise regards as odious.

If we apply Mill’s logic, the results of the poll should have been reversed. For if casino profits were just the fruit of “private” transactions, a case could be made that we ought to tolerate them. They are not simply private transactions, however, when they contribute to the public treasury. One of the issues that deserves broader discussion is whether kickbacks from gambling are a corruption of public life; whether a just society would educate its children by exploiting those who would gamble themselves and their own children into insolvency out of economic desperation or addiction.

That not all gamblers are problem gamblers is beside the point, although it is well documented that casinos increase the number of them. Financing public services through gambling imposes a burden that falls disproportionately on the disadvantaged. Maine started down that road with the lottery. Those poll results suggest that we may already be addicted. If we need still more money after playing the casino card, what will we turn to next? Think about it.

Ronald P. Morrison, Ph.D. is professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of New England in Biddeford.