“it’s participating in activities – any activities – for which you lack the financial resources that is immoral.”
Then Bill Gates must never committ immoral acts, no?
“it’s participating in activities – any activities – for which you lack the financial resources that is immoral.”
Then Bill Gates must never committ immoral acts, no?
I wouldn’t know.
Anyway, read my post – I never said that acting financially irresponsibly was the only immoral act one could commit. Certainly, say, adultery is immoral regardless of the financial consequences. I just noted that financial irresponsibility could transform an otherwise morally neutral act into an immoral act.
But adultery doesn’t pass the “doesn’t harm anyone else” test because there is a strong possibility even probability that your spouse and/or children will get hurt and hurt badly. That’s why I used gay lovers and occasional pot smokers in my example.
Well, whatever. Unless one of the Bennett defenders responds to the argument from Slate that DoctorJ posted, I’d say this party’s over.
This is a minor digression, but Sam, the Washington Monthly piece was clearly referring to where Bennett stood at the end of the night, not how many chips he fed into the machine:
The other thing is that I find that 1% house take rather improbable: even at $500 a pull, Bennett’s arm would have fallen off before he’d have been able to lose that sort of money at that sort of rate of return, since you’d have to bet $1M - 2000 pulls - to lose $10K, on average. And his losses were frequently an order of magnitude greater than that.
Besides, slots and video poker are generally conceded to be two of the most addicting forms of gambling. It’s hard to imagine that the casinos wouldn’t want to take greater advantage of that than indicated by a 1% take.
I’ve never been one to let a party die, so why don’t we let Jonah Goldberg, one of the people criticized in Saletan’s Slate article, respond for himself:
Just lost a reply in cyberspace. Let me try again:
Liberals have never had a particular stance on gambling. We’re not judging Bennett by our standards, anyway, but by his. That’s the point.
Bennett’s been pretty clear that morality should inform legality, and not the other way around. So the legality issue is bogus. Making marijuana, prostitution, and gay marraige legal would not make them acceptable, let alone right, in Bennett’s view. One must explain why gambling differs fundamentally, not legally.
Everything’s different from everything else. No shit. Now, are the differences germane?
That’s like saying, “because I said so.” Now, back to the top:
Just did this one.
Here’s the crux. Bennett hasn’t been carving out nice drug-specific arguments; he’s been assserting moral principles that naturally apply to addictive behaviors generally, and applying them to drugs. Unless his defenders can show why those principles somehow don’t apply to the specific behavior of gambling, then it must be assumed that they do. No such effort has been made.
Been here, done this too.
Goldberg avoids the point. The point is not whether gambling is or isn’t bad. The point is not whether Bennet has said it is or isn’t bad. The point is that Bennet is now, for the first time, finding himself part of a moral outgroup: not from liberals, but from his own camp. How does he react to anti-gambling conservatives? With the “responsible adults” line that he’s many times rejected IN PRINCIPLE when other outgroups have used it. To that argument, he’s always maintained that, no, even if you are somehow able to handle these things without trouble, it still degrades and hurts society. So, at issue is not whether gambling is right or not (or the silly idea that the liberal critics are suddenly anti-gambling). The issue is: some people, people in Bennet’s own camp, think gambling is immoral, regardless of whether it can be done responsibly or not, regardless of its legal status. Bennet is giving them a response which he’s rejected countless times in other situations, not on any specific case for why something specific is immoral, but on the principle of the “responsible adults” excuse.
And pointing out the question of legality is particularly silly, since the whole issue in most of those debates was “should drugs be legal or not.”
I seem to hear this sort of things a lot these days. When confronted with a difficult question someone will say, “I’m so tired of hearing this lame question again and again.” That answer is, of course, not an answer at all but a plea to stop asking the question. Its real intent is to diminish the question and the questioner’s status. If a question gets asked over and over again, it’s a good bet that it’s because ther has not been a very good answer to it yet.
No one has said that, however many have drawn the quite legitimate analogy between the two.
So if I decide that killing, say, a Black man is not in my own heart as morally reprehensible as killing a white guy then I should get a get-out-of-jail-free pass? More to the point, wouldn’t this mean that none of Bennett’s writing apply to anyone view things differently in their own heart. Now I’ve not read Bennett’s books, but I’ll wager that somewhere in there he rails against those who suggest that there are not moral absolutes.
It sure seems to me that Bennett’s whole shtick is about virtues and morals and not about the law. For someone to suddenly claim that since it’s not illegal it’s OK flies in the face of everything Bennett claims to be about.
No one I’ve seen has claimed that gambling is a “terrible moral failing” to them, but they have claimed that anyone who sees homosexuality and pot smoking as moral failings has some explaining to do if they don’t include their own vices of choice in the “moral failings” list.
You know, Dewey and others on this board have put forth some articulate and well reasoned defenses of Bill Bennett, but this guy!.. Wow!!! It’s like shooting ducks in a barrel.
But he was making drug-specific arguments. You’re the one that’s trying to apply them to a different field, so the burden is on you to prove that they should apply to the behavior of gambling. You’ve pointed out that they’re both addictive, so I’ll respond to that below.
Legality informs us on public opinion. The fact that drugs are illegal, and gambling is not, informs us that the public sees that the addictive and other harmful results of drug use are much worse than the harmful results of gambling. Thus, our society has chosen to draw a rather radical distinction between the two – drug abuse is absolutely prohibited, and gambling is not just legal, but state-sanctioned and even encouraged.
Bennett’s point was that marijuana use empowers the drug trade and gives rise to a culture that leads people to use more powerful – and hence more deadly – drugs. That doesn’t apply to gambling. Habitual drug use poisons the body and damages the mind and leads to death. That doesn’t apply to gambling. There aren’t “gateway” games of chance that lead to “more deadly” games of chance. People don’t start with keno and build up to russian roulette. (Although I do admit to nearly killing myself during one 48 hour stretch in Vegas, but that was due more to the combination of alcohol and sleep deprivation than the poker and blackjack).
The point, naturally, is that drug use and gambling are radically different in terms of their harmful and addictive qualities, and that American society as a whole sees this. Heck, caffiene is addictive, too. So is Bennett a hypocrite if he drinks coffee? Is he enabling a culture that leads to caffiene addictions?
It’s ok to go to radical lengths to prohibit drugs because of how harmful they are. Gambling is not nearly as harmful. In the words of Jules from Pulp Fiction, “Ain’t the same ballpark, ain’t the same league, ain’t even the same fuckin’ sport.” Those differences of degree are why it’s ok to oppose “enabling” the abuse of illegal drugs, but those arguments don’t apply to anything that enables the gambling or coffee cultures.
Incidentally, I’m for the legalization of most drugs. I just find much of the critique of Bennett (with whom I usually disagree on matters of social legislation) to be disengenuous and logically unsound.
Many of the social conservatives with whom I’ve spoken on this issue have brought this up. They are disappointed that Bennett spouted the libertarian “I can handle it” line that he’s battled against so many times. But Bennett also said that he considers himself an example, and because of that, he’s going to stop gambling. So he didn’t just spout the line, he toed the line. I think that’s pretty different from the usual “I can handle it” response.
His point is that the analogy doesn’t hold because the two are, in fact, different.
I have no idea what you’re getting at here. Suffice to say, the answer to your question is no. Murder is illegal regardless of your feelings on it, and gambling is legal regardless of your feelings on it. Goldberg was simply pointing out that people can’t say Bennett is hypocritical simply because his stance on drugs, if applied to gambling, would make him a hypocrite. The reason you can’t say that is because Bennett (along with much of the rest of American society) doesn’t see the two as equivalent.
He does.
As far as I can tell, nobody – least of all, Bill Bennett – is claiming that gambling is moral simply because it’s legal. And I don’t think Golberg was advancing that argument either. He’s saying that the situation between “actions that enable illegal drug use” is not equivalent to “actions that enable legal gambling.”
Why? What is the similarity between homosexuality, drug use, and gambling that says that everyone that opposes one must oppose them all?
Reload.
Was he really? What’s drug-specific about the ideas in:
Switch “gambling” for “drugs”, and substitute “children with no roof over their head because Daddy gambled away the rent money” for “cocaine babies”, and we’re home free.
What burden needs to be met? It’s right out there. Burden’s in your court to show it’s different.
Cool! Now we get to decide what is virtuous by majority vote.
I hereby put you in charge of the resulting upcoming revision of Bennett’s books.
Since the American people are now overwhelmingly opposed to laws against sodomy, whether or not they’re gay-specific, I guess Bennett now feels that homosexual sodomy is A-OK for those who can handle it.
At least, that’s the direct implication of your claim. But since it’s false, that undermines your contention.
Gambling used to lead to mob violence, until they legalized it. So I can’t see why not.
It doesn’t apply to marijuana or homosexual relations, either. And IIRC, he was talking about marijuana.
[quote]
He was talking about marijuana, which is either nonaddictive or very mildly addictive, depending on who you talk to, and isn’t any more lethal than the booze that Bennett drinks.
He would be if he adopted your wilderland of progressive rationalizations.
Again, he was talking about marijuana, which isn’t particularly harmful. It’s a gateway drug because it - surprise! - shares a common distribution system with other, more deadly illegal drugs.
It was, when it was run by the mob. And still is, when people bet with illegal bookies and can’t pay up.
To tie up my own loose end…
Hentor, thanks for the synopsis on that moral theory. Sounds quite intriguing, and I’m going to find some more info on it. I won’t respond to it too much here, for fear of unnecessary hijack, other than to say that it sounds like something in which I could agree with the theory, but not necessarily the application thereof. I’ll reserve final judgement until I find a more thorough discussion of it.
Oh, and Age Quod Agis, between your quoting of a Goldberg piece, and your masterful defense thereof, you’re my new SDMB Hero of the Week. Kudos!
Jeff
Oh, a reader responds to Jonah at that link AQA provided earlier:
If one believes the drug comparison somehow fails, I can’t see how this one does.
So… are you conceeding the point? He said something that stood against his principles, and then backed off under criticism. If he’s toeing the line in the way you state, then he’d be implicitly admitting that what he did was wrong: even as a responsible adult, he was setting a bad example for others in precisely the way we’ve been talking about. Still doesn’t change the fact that his reaction when the chips were down was to appeal to a theory of social aresponsibility that he’s spent a lifetime decrying.
And while the cry is almost certainly going to be “well, he stopped it, why are you still harping about it?” that too is not exactly the Bennet approach. Remember the whole death of outrage complaint? How we amoral hussies are just willing to let poor conduct, like Presidential adultery, go without raising a hue and cry for days on end?
Not germane to this debate, since it’s just pile-on, but a pretty funny promotional offer nonetheless:
http://www.thestranger.com/specials/bennett.html
This editorial at FoxNews is pretty spot-on, not about attecking Bennet, but rather on the problems that cultural conservatives face in both trying to defend Santorum’s philosophy and Bennet’s gambling.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,86238,00.html
But that’s exactlywhat an analogy is: a comparison between two dissimilar things.
Goldberg tried to defend Bennett by saying that the activity in question was not a sin in Bennett’s heart. Even you admit that Bennett touts the idea of moral absolutes, so just because someone does’t consider something wrong in their heart that doesn’t mean, to Bill Bennett anyway, that it’s not immoral. You seem to want to make a big deal out of the fact that Bennett’s gambling was legal. Homosexual behavior is legal in some states and not in others. Do you think for a second that Bennett would say that gay sex is only immoral in those states where there are sodomy laws?