How the hell would this be ethical, no matter how consensual and non-coercive it is?
The money is not a college fund. Your customer's previously-held inaccurate predictions of the future turned out to be false. He changed his mind. Your assertion that it "is intended for paying for college" is false. It is intended for paying for roulette.
It is not your right to choose for others how they spend their money.
Stop trying to control other people because of your certainty in the belief that you know what's best for them.
It can be better to temporarily infringe someone's rights if it stops them from doing something that they will regret for the rest of their life.
No, this is false. You're incapable of guessing what other people may or may not regret with enough accuracy to use it as a justification for infringing upon the rights of others.
Furthermore, most are heavily influenced by societal norms and customs, making this even more dangerous a justification when used against the rights of those with eccentricities or nonstandard tastes or lifestyles.
It's never ok to infringe upon someone's rights.
A question: how do people find themselves "in the clutches of an addiction"? How do they escape? Could it possibly be their own free will to decide to smoke the first cigarette, or their individual decision to walk past the bar without going in, on their way home from AA?
Do you agree that it's right to have age restrictions for buying and selling alcohol?
You realise that many alcoholics start drinking when they're children?
People are social creatures. Trying to ignore that and treat everybody as isolated individuals ignores those.
Clearly it would be immoral for you to intentionally provide a source of liquidity for stolen goods. How does that show anything about your gambler?
Often legality and morality do align (but really not as often as you'd think), and this is fortunate, because it allows good people an easy mental short-cut for weighing one's actions based on legality (and punishment), as well as protecting the weaker-willed parts of society that often end up on the wrong end of moral decisions by people like sneak, who'd let people drink themselves to death because if everybody was completely free they'd surely decide out of their own free will to do what's best for them and nobody would ever prey on the weak-willed like that, ever.
All consensual and non-coercive transactions are ethical.
Another example is the phone scammers offering 'virus fixes'. These are generally in violation of different laws.
Whether software contracts include that same kind of verbiage, I don't know.
Both transactions were consentual and noncoercive. There were no threats of violence. An adult business owner signed a contract for services which were provided exactly as specified. The customer didn't have to agree to the first, poorly negotiated contract. And they don't have to pay extra for the extra services later on - it's entirely their choice.
It's no more extortion than if you need a new ink cartridge for your printer and you find they're expensive.
I put it to you that the situation I've outlined is unethical, even though it's consensual and non-coercive.
A half-way competent attempt to examine this issue would need to dig deeper into the meaning of "consensual", "non-coercive", and the fact that we are engineering these products, knowing that these cognitive biases (defects) exists.
Your dogmatic quote meets none of these criteria, and is frankly a pathetic attempt to address this complex and well-studied problem.
It is clear that they are undertaken with free will, and ended similarly thereby. All of AA and everyone who's ever quit smoking stand as evidence.
Playing the "no one's pointing a gun to your head" card and claiming it is therefore "non-coersive" in defense of targeting and manipulating addictive behavior may very well be profitable but it's delusional and downright dishonest to everyone, including yourself, to think it isn't exploitive and conducive to serious personal and social issues. You need look no further in the historical record to see how this plays out than the tobacco and alcohol industry.
That is not accurate.
If you're really interested in continuing to debate whether your perspective of addiction should be adopted by others feel free to search Google for "addiction" or "is addiction a lifelong problem" or if that's something you don't have time for start with the first Google result I pulled up: http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/subabuse99/chap2.htm
There are plenty of other, better, sources that will provide more thorough descriptions of both the physical and psychological characteristics of addition. Practically all of them acknowledge that addiction, once attained, does not grant an individual the luxury of choice as you entertain it. One can certainly choose to seek the tools to control the impulses of addiction through willpower (be it internally or externally inspired), but that will never mean they can choose to make the underlying addiction go away and never bother them again at any point for the rest of their lives.
Have you ever met a "former" addict? Plenty will tell you it's not as simple as that, unless you're using your own novel definition of "choice," "free will," and given studies generally show genetic predisposition is a factor, "born with."
The ones who actually want to quit, do.
It's unfathomable to someone who hasn't smoked.
If you want to make your business about manipulation of the customer, don't pretend to be morally pure. You are scum.
Should we factor this in, or is public health department a nanny state intervention?
The lines of free will and accountability are blurred by things like mental illness, addictions, childhood naivety, etc.
That's not the case. People choose to stop being addicted to things all the time.
Where did you get this view on ethics? It certainly isn't most peoples view, for sure.
I think every time I hear "you should eb ashamed" the free market guy SHOULD stand up and say NO, morality is actually whining that someone should be coerced into doing something they wouldnt want to selfishly do. If there is a market for your thing then caveat emptor.
Screwing your clients? The market will decide whether you can keep operating.
Convince my girlfriend of that.
Seriously, though, it doesn't even pass the laugh test. People control their own circumstances. Making those circumstances available to be chosen does not alter the source or responsibility of those decisions.
Smokers choose to smoke. Gamblers choose to gamble.
Proof lies in those who subsequently choose to stop.
You always have free will, even if you aren't using it at the moment.
You are assuming that what one person can do, the rest of the population can do with a similar amount of effort. This should be self-evidently false.
Some people can stop addictive behavior with relatively little effort, other people need external help and tons of effort, and other people will literally prefer to die before stopping.
The only way to say that the latter two groups "don't actually want to quit" is to redefine "wanting to" in terms of "being able to", which makes your argument circular.
It is simply not your place to decide for others how they should get their dopamine, or how much they should be paying for it.