An ethical case against ‘responsible’ gambling advertising: A UK context-based, semiotic perspective

Gambling advertising has hardly been subjected to moral scrutiny and ethical evaluation is long overdue. In this paper, I put ‘responsible gambling’ messages of UK marketing campaigns purporting efforts by the gambling industry to encourage safer gambling, to ethical scrutiny. A UK context-based ‘semio-tic’ analysis serves as a prelude to the assessment of the moral blameworthiness of gambling advertising. Drawing mainly from Kantian deontological ethics and Ross’ prima facie moral duties, a theoretical framework built upon the key issues of honesty, the avoidance of deception, non-maleficence, and legitimacy, is proposed. The semio-ethical evaluation leads to an unambiguous verdict of moral wrongness. In addition to a novel approach combining semiotics and ethics, and radical legislative implications, the study contributes to developing a better appreciation of how a higher-order semiotic reading of textual signs used in gambling advertising can at least help mitigate the social cognitive conditioning of public perception.