Compromising the public good? Civil society as beneficiary of gambling revenue

Profits from legal gambling are often channelled to good causes. This system embeds the predicament of whether citizens' potentially problematic gambling activities should be a source of funding for the public good. In this article, this dilemma is unfolded by the receivers of public grants that stem from gambling revenues. A total of twenty-three representatives of Civil Society Organizations were interviewed as beneficiaries of the Finnish state-owned gambling monopolies. The article illustrates explicit dependencies and hidden ethical dilemmas, suggesting that CSOs may have limited possibilities of making ethically consistent decisions in view of the origin of their funding.