Gambling is filled with ethical problems, having an addiction to gambling could ruin a persons career more importantly life. On the other hand some people could control themselves and quit while they are ahead. Paragraph 1: After reading several articles and chapters on gambling, I found a lot of people giving there opinions from both sides of the spectrum. The first article I read was an article from “LIBERTARIAN MONEY”. The titles pretty much self explanatory, this article was very liberal and argued how gambling could be ethical.
Liberty (Authors Name) brought up several valid rguments that I thought where worth sharing. To start off, He mentioned that one of the big topics that come up while talking about how gambling is unethical is the whole “dog eat dog style of profiting. ” Which is Basically saying that people that benefit will be benefitting from another persons loss. The way he broke down the argument was very efficient. Liberty said that “The problem I find with this argument is that it could be considered for gambling ethics, business ethics, and just about everything else in the world.
For example, one restaurant’s growth is usually at the expense of another local restaurant. Customers go to the one they prefer more often costing the other restaurant owners money. This can also be seen in nature. When one species is thriving and growing, it’s prey starts to suffer. The great thing about nature is that it has it’s own protection mechanisms inherent in the system. As one species kills off it’s prey, the species uses up its own food supply.
That slows down the population growth. That allows the prey to correct itself. (Naturally, it doesn’t always work out that way. ” How I interpreted this phrase was that In the end, theres always going to be winners and losers in this world. Whether its getting a job, sports and even gambling. If we where all winners there would be no competition and as a species we would never advance. We must face the consequences and learn to accept the negative outcomes. From there it is up to us to take action and change or stick with what is happening. Getting back on topic, a lot of the of the articles and research I read against gambling where mostly focused on how it creates addicts and is targeted to the less fortunate.
Although this contradicts what i just mentioned above and my beliefs, there was several interesting articles I read. ScientificAmerican shared several stories about people ruining their lives due to gambling. Majority of them where a slippery slope of how people started small, got addicted, started to steal from loved ones and ended up doing jail time. Personally, I haven’t had a family member that has gone through this kind of addiction so I really can’t relate. The main reason I came across this page was because I was interested in why people become addicted to gambling in the first place.
Doing some research on that i found that the pathological gamblers and drug addicts share many of the same enetic predispositions for impulsivity and reward seeking. One could make the assumption of relating a casino to a drug dealer in a way. The drug dealer supplies the dopefiend with its high, while the casino supplies its addicts with big thrills. In the end dopefiernd and supplier run out of money to get there high/ thrills and result to violence in order I came across an interesting presentation titled “Deceptive and unethical? Reflections on gambling advertising” which was created by the Swedish National Institute of Public Health.
In the slideshow it mentions that gambling advertising incites egoism, atalism and other bad values along with being deceptive. The deceptive part is very true in my opinion. Kind of like tobacco industry targeting young teenagers with the colorful wrappers and candy like flavors. I believe that Lottery systems are kind of doing the same They’ve created hundreds of colorful scratch-its and video lottery games which easily pull in simple minded people and take their money. Living in Oregon, I went on Oregonlotterys home page to see if they did anything on the sorts of these lines.
Right from the get go i could see how the website attracted the general Oregon population. In the center of the home page it said “Together We Do Good Things”. After that they had a list on how there funds educate the youth, maintain our parks and grow our economy. I find this somewhat unethical, although the lottery companies are giving back I feel they’re basically telling people its okay to gamble because there money is going to a good cause kind of giving them a incentive to gamble. A study done by Cornell University showed that mostly the poor and disadvantaged spend the money on lotteries.
While we all know gambling is a source of entertainment to play, studies how that people in poverty look to the lottery as a way to improve their lives. End result is not that good, instead of helping it often hurts and puts people n a financial predicament. There are several ethical problems that arise from this, but its really hard to put the blame on someone. The questions I thought I thought of while reading was if it ethical for companies to advertise in poor neighborhoods knowing they are more likely to buy? Or should people be accounted for there own doings?
Gambling companies are keeping up with technology by adding online gambling. There are several ethicals issues with online ambling. To start off, many companies gather information and data about the user. Companies are somewhat invading the gamblers privacy by collecting information on them. I read an article on Academia that said “experts in problem gambling have been recommending to gaming companies that they should start using their large behavioral tracking data sets to help identify problem gamblers rather than’ exploit them, and share the data with academics.
I thought this was a powerful statement the author made, many gaming companies are filled with greedy individuals which only seek to benefit themselves. Rather than ruining addicts lives they could help them out and potentially turn there life around. Online gambling is easily accessible, for the everyday addict this may become a problem as they don’t actually see there money going away. Fedex’s founder Fred Smith actually saved his company off gambling during his start up. Fedex was on the verge of bankruptcy, losing over $1 million a month while gas prices were rising.
The company had $5000 to its name which wasn’t enough to continue operating there planes and $24,000 of fuel. Fred took the money to vegas and played blackjack and came up 27,000. This was enough money to keep the company running for a few more days. Shortly after that Smith successfully managed to raise $11 million to keep his company alive. By 1976 Fedex made its first profit of 3. 6 million. Although Fred didn’t have a gambling problem, he was on the short end of money. He made the bold decision to spend the rest of the companies money on black jack and it paid off.
Historical data implies that when the economy goes bad, lottery revenues go up, because “when people are feeling desperate, they are more likely to stop by the gas station and buy five ottery tickets, hoping they get a big windfall. ” Beginning of this term I took a trip to Las Vegas which was kind of why I chose this topic. I wanted to do some research on gambling and how people reflected over the thought of it. Personally I enjoy gambling, I don’t see anything ethically wrong with as long a person can handle themselves.
I set a time and limit for myself which helped avoid overspending. Although I do realize how people become addicted so easily to gambling while I was there. To start off, I realized there was no clocks in the Casino, my phone was dead and I wasn’t wearing my watch. I sked the dealer what time it was but didn’t get a response since he wasn’t wearing a watch either. Point being it is very easy to let time slip away while gambling and casinos know this which is why they don’t have clocks. While playing slots a waiter came around and asked me if I needed anything to drink every 15 minutes.
I knew the casinos motif here and I didn’t want to fall for there trap. Although the person next me did, after watching him insert $20 bills for the next 30 minutes I could tell he was a little tipsy. The waiter kept feeding him while he fed the machine. A person loses worries when they are drunk and his person clearly did, I’m sure he regret it the next morning. Thinking about the situation now I thought it was unethical for the waiter to keep giving him drinks while knowing he had to much. Last comment on my trip to vegas was that how it was really captivating.
I found this unethical in a way, All the machines made loud noises and from every corner of the room all I would hear is “WIN! WIN! WIN! kind of inserted that win mentality in my head. Watching Jordan Belfort video in class reminded me a lot of this, the whole fast paced lifestyle losing track of time was kind of similar to how Belfort ran his office. Earlier during football season I made a Fanduel account after constantly seeing the commercials. The promotion they had going on said that if you put $100 in your fan duel account the company would give you $60.
So I did just that, I put the $100 thinking I would receive my $60 right away. This I never received, after reading there fine print I would’ve had to spend over $1000 within the app to get my $60. In the end I spent my $100 on setting the perfect line up which I never achieved and only got $5 out of fan duel. This kind of advertising I feel like is unethical for fan duel to do. My intentions where to use fan duels $60 and quit playing, but instead I ended up my $100 and lost it all. If i was a manager and a employee of mine had a gambling problem, I would try and help him.
I would do the best to my ability to help them understand that they have a problem. I would encourage them to pick up a new hobby and try to keep them away from the casinos. If that doesn’t work I would encourage them to get help from a professional. I feel like at that point the most i could i do is offer support and tell them to seek professional help, its up to them to understand that they need help otherwise they would never change. Some Deontological questions that popped up in my head while reading this questions where what are my ethical duties, obligations here?
If i was in this predicament how I would I want to be treated. Personally if I had a problem, I would get annoyed of people nagging at me to change and possibly shut them out of my life. Coming from that mindset I wouldn’t want to constantly nag the employee about his problem, I would remind him that there is always help if he/she needs it and I am there to help. As a manger I believe it is my job to help but not act as the employees parent. They’re grown and could make their own decisions.
