Yes Thisj Jacobs mentioned below, but thanks for bringing to my attention.

Thank you for sharing this. I was not aware of this Profit for Good casino.

Re #1 - the customers in OPs contemplation would have already committed the funds to be donated and prospective wins would inure to the benefit of charities. So it isn't clear to me that the same typical harm applies (if you buy the premise that gamblers are net harmed by gambling). There wouldn't be the circumstance where the gambler feels they need to win it back - because they've already lost the money when they committed it to the DAF.

Re #2 - this could produce a good experience for customers - donating money to charities while playing games. And with how OP set it up, they know what they are losing (unlike with a typical casino there's that hope of winning it big).

Re #3 - for the reasons discussed above, the predatory and deceptive implications are less significant here. Unlike when someone takes money to a slot machine in a typical casino, when they put the money in the DAF they no longer have a chance of "getting it back"

Re #4 - yeah there might be some bad pr. But if people liked this and substituted it for normal gambling, it probably would be less morally problematic for the reasons discussed above.

Re #5 - I'm not really sure that this business is as morally corrosive as you suggest... It's potentially disadvantaging the gambler's preferred charity to the casino's, but not by much, and not without the gambler's knowledge.

Re #6 - the gamblers could choose the charities that are the beneficiaries of their DAF. And I don't know that enjoying gambling means that you wouldn't like to see kids saved from malaria and such.

I think your criticisms would better apply to a straight Profit for Good casino (normal casino with charities as shareholder). The concerns you bring up are some reasons I think a PFG casino, though an interesting idea, would not be a place I'd be looking to do as an early, strategic PFG (also big capital requirements).

OP's proposal is much more wholesome and actually addresses a lot more of the ethical concerns. I just think people may not be interested in gambling as much if there was not the prospect of winning money for themselves.

I think the same amount of healthy and problem gambling would take place in aggregate regardless of whether there was a PFG casino among a set of casinos. But maybe some people would choose to migrate that activity toward the PFG casino, so that more good could happen (they're offering the same odds as competitors).

It comes down to whether you're OK with getting involved in something icky if the net harm you cause to gamblers is zero and you can produce significant good in doing so. For me, this doesn't really pose a problem.

Thanks for your proposal. I have actually thought a Profit for Good casino would be a good idea (high capital requirements, but I think it could provide a  competitive edge in the Vegas strip, for instance). I find your take on it pretty interesting

I think a casino that did not limit the funds that could be gambled to charitable accounts of some sort would have a much larger market than one that did. There is a lot of friction in requiring the set up of charitable accounts even for people who were interested in charitable giving and enjoyed gambling. I also think that you are going into a narrower subset of prospective clients that have these overlapping qualities. In the meantime, there are millions of people who consistently demonstrate demand for gambling at casinos.
 

I think a lot of people would feel fine about playing at the casino and winning, because they know that there are winners and losers in casinos, but the house (in the end) always wins. Winners and losers would both be participating in a process that would be helping dramatically better the world. 

Could you explain the legal advantage of your proposal vis-a-vis a normal casino either owned by a charitable foundation or being a nonprofit itself (Humanitix, for instance is a ticketing company that is structured as a nonprofit itself)? Is it that people's chips would essentially be tax-deductible (because contributing to their DAF is tax-deductible)? 

Another idea would just be a normal casino that was owned by a charitable foundation or trust -a "Profit for Good" casino. People could get the exact same value proposition they get from other normal casinos, but by patronizing the Profit for Good Casino, they (in expectation)would be helping save lives or otherwise better the world.

You could have a great night in which you win hundreds or thousands of dollars, but even if you lose, they know that your losses are helping to dramatically better the world. 

I think this is an excellent idea.

 Orgs or "proto-orgs" in their early stages are often in a catch-22. They don't have the time or expertise (because they don't have full time staff) to develop a strong grantwriting or other fundraising operations, which could be enabled by startup funds. An org that was familiar with the funding landscape, could familiarize itself with new orgs, and help it secure startup funds could help resolve the catch-22 that orgs find themselves at step 0.

Worth noting that if there are like 10,000 EAs today in the world with a population of 8,000,000,000, the percentage of EAs globally is 0.000125 percent.

If we keep the same proportion and apply that to the world population in 1776, there would be about 1,000 EAs globally and about 3 EAs in the United States. If they were overrepresented in the United States by a factor of ten, there would be about 30.

I don't think people are saying putting time and/or money to charities that address the poor in rich countries is not helping people, but merely that you could help more poor people in poor countries with the same resources. Thus, if we are saying that we are considering the interests of the unfortunate in poor and rich countries equally, we would want to commit our limited resources to the developing world.

I think a lot of times EAs are assuming a given set of resources that they have to commit to doing good. With that assumption, the counterfactual of a donation to the food pantry is a donation to a more cost effective charity. The "warm fuzzy/utilon" dichotomy that you deride here actually supports your notion that the food pantry could compete with the donor's luxury consumption instead. This is because warm fuzzies (the donor's psychic benefit derived from giving) could potentially be a substitute for the consumption of luxury goods (going out to eat, etc.).

So, the concept of the fuzzies (albeit maybe with language you find offensive) actually supports your notion that, within individual donation decisions, helping locally does not always compete with effective giving.

I think the sort of world that could be achieved by the massive funding of effective charities is a rather inspiring vision. Natalie Cargill, Longview Philanthropy's CEO, lays out a rather amazing set of outcomes that could be achieved in her TED Talk.

I think that a realistic method of achieving these levels of funding are Profit for Good businesses, as I lay out in my TEDx Talk. I think it is realistic because most people don't want to give something up to fund charities -as donation would require- but if they could help solve world problems by buying products or services they want or need of similar quality at the same price, they would.