What’s Wrong with Betting on Death and Destruction?

“Prediction markets” describe themselves as platforms where people can buy and sell “shares” that represent possible outcomes of events, actions that most people would call “placing bets.” The two major players – Kalshi and Polymarket – have been lauded by their supporters as ways to gather important information about the future: by making everything available to bet on, the reasoning goes, prediction markets can harvest the wisdom of crowds in real time. On Polymarket’s and Kalshi’s respective homepages you might find people collectively predicting the value of Bitcoin, winners and losers of basketball games, Oscar award winners, and outcomes of elections in countries around the world, among an endless stream of other things that may or may not happen.

According to their many, many critics, however, prediction markets are thinly-veiled online casinos that are able to remain in operation solely through the exploitation of regulatory loopholes. Since entering the mainstream late in 2025, there have already been several calls for greater regulation of prediction markets, alongside some calls to shut them down entirely.

A recent wave of criticism came after Kalshi allowed users to bet on two events: whether former leader of Iran Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would retain power, and whether nuclear weapons would be launched by a certain date. While there are certainly reasons to be concerned about the existence of platforms that allow anyone to bet on anything, there seems to be something particularly disturbing about allowing people to bet on whether someone will die, or, in the case of a nuclear weapons launch, whether a lot of us will die.

In the US, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy called the situation “dystopian,” stating that:

“Once events that involve good and evil simply become a financial product, I don’t know how right and wrong matters any longer… People shouldn’t be rooting for people to die because they placed a bet.”

This feels like a perfectly natural reaction. But why? What’s so bad about betting on death and destruction?

We get one answer from Murphy, who says that there is something wrong with rooting for people to suffer or die. We might wonder, though, whether the act of placing a bet is the same thing as “rooting” or hoping for it to happen. There are definitely times when this is the case: when I bet on my favorite team to win a game, my betting and my desire for that outcome to occur go hand-in-hand. There are other times, though, when this isn’t necessarily the case: I might bet on something that I don’t particularly want to happen, but just think is inevitable.

For example, maybe I’ve been tracking the increased frequency of hurricanes as a result of climate change, and am confident that there will be more hurricanes than usual this year. By wagering in Kalshi’s “natural disasters” section I am not necessarily rooting for hurricanes in the sense that I actively desire there to be more of them, but am instead just confident that they will occur. The gambler might then argue that by wagering on death and destruction they do not actively hope that people will suffer or die; instead, they are just hoping to make a buck.

We might also distinguish “hoping that an event that we bet on occurs” from “hoping that all the consequences of that event occur.” For example, when I bet on my favorite team to win a game, I hope that they win. But I also know that a consequence of my team winning is that fans of the other team will feel sad. In hoping that my team wins, though, I don’t hope that other people suffer: that their suffering is a consequence of my desired outcome does not mean that it’s something I also desire. So the prediction market user might argue that even though they bet on events that have death and destruction as consequences, that does not mean that they are rooting for death and destruction.

Of course, this kind of reasoning is harder to justify when someone is betting that a specific person dies. We might then make the distinction between something be a direct consequence of a bet and an indirect one; for example, “fans of a rival team feeling sad” is an indirect consequence of my team winning, but “many people dying” is a direct consequence of nuclear war. It might not always be obvious how direct the consequences are when it comes to events we bet on, but the connection between mass death and nuclear bombs at least seems pretty clear. So perhaps we can say that just as it’s wrong to root for death and destruction, it is also wrong to bet on death and destruction, since even though you might not technically be rooting for it, it is a direct consequence of what you are rooting for.

However, not everyone betting on death and destruction are betting for it to happen. What about the people who bet against someone dying, or bet that there will be fewer natural disasters, or that nuclear Armageddon won’t happen any time soon?

There still seems to be something unsavory about wagering on these events, even if you’re betting that they won’t happen. Nothing we’ve said so far, though, can explain why. If I bet that there won’t be nuclear war in the near future, then it hardly seems right to say that I am rooting for anyone to die, and the direct consequences of what I am betting on also seem to be perfectly fine (e.g., no one dies from a nuclear bomb). So what’s wrong with betting against death and destruction?

Here we might look to our old friend Immanuel Kant for an explanation, who argued that it is never morally permissible to use people as means to an end. Sometimes this idea is spelled out in terms of a requirement to respect the dignity of other people: when we bet on whether one or more people will die, for instance, we are then arguably treating their lives as a means to make money, and not as something that is worth valuing for their own sake. Note that this is the case even if we are betting on people not dying: the fact that we are treating their lives as something to be bet on at all fails to ascribe them the dignity they deserve.

We might worry that this kind of reasoning would lead us to the conclusion that every bet involving other people would be morally wrong: the minute I treat you not as a person but as something that can make me money, Kant (or someone Kant-adjacent) might say you are failing to treat them with the dignity they deserve. We might think that it’s significantly worse, though, to bet on an event that potentially involves suffering and death than betting on whether the Raptors will win their upcoming game, even though in both cases we are using people as means to an end.

Perhaps there is something in the vicinity of Kant’s way of thinking that can explain why it feels wrong to take any bet on events involving death and destruction: these bets treat human life with a kind of disregard that is not present when we are betting on things like sports or some of the goofier prediction market options. In betting on death and destruction the problem is not so much that one possesses the active desire to see people get hurt or die, it’s that one is exemplifying a callousness and cynicism that fails to respect their fellow human beings. We might then agree with Kant that there is a failure to respect the dignity of other human beings, not simply because we are using them to make a buck, but because the way we are looking to make a buck off of them treats their lives as something that is only valuable to us insofar as we can profit from them.

There’s good reason to remove the ability to bet on whether someone will die or whether nuclear weapons will be launched from prediction markets, as Kalshi has already done. But we also seem to have good reason to call for the removal of other categories involving death and destruction, such as tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, and pandemics (all available on Polymarket) as well as bets on individual events like “measles cases this year?”, “new pandemic?”, and “Which vaccines will RFK end recommendations for in 2026?” (all available on Kalshi). If there is something morally repugnant about betting on death and destruction then it seems that prediction markets still have a lot of work to do.