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Notes -
I'll take a swing at it: some people are incapable of good decision making about specific things, in this case gambling. They are effectively mentally incompetent in this narrow area but are otherwise generally mentally competent enough to be responsible for themselves. Therefore, similar to how we don't allow children or the insane to buy guns, we should ban people who have demonstrated this incompetence from gambling.
This is the mental illness or childhood or savage argument. And it is an unprincipled exception that cannot stand.
Most instructive here is the case of John Stuart Mill. Ever the archetypal liberal. Who makes this argument for India, but makes the argument that destroys this one for Women.
It is no surprise that Liberals have had to give up this, because it isn't motivated. Ultimately it is not principle that prevents the Liberal from giving children or the mentally ill dangerous weapons, but mere pragmatism. Indeed one can perfectly imagine (and scifi authors do) a world where these actions would be without lasting consequence. And in the Culture, giving children guns isn't really that big an issue, after all we can resurrect them if they splatter each other's brains. The question of whether this is reasonable is entirely evacuated, because it is an individual whim, and those are beyond question.
This entire line of reasoning is vulnerable to the Critical Theorist demand of realized freedom instead of procedural freedom. i.e.: you have constructed a society that has enslaved the mentally illl or children or gamblers, and this makes you their oppressor, your own principles demand that you create the condition where they can roam around thinking they're Napoleon/eat infinite candy/gamble their life savings without consequence.
This has been the ultimate Liberal project since Rousseau. Your pragmatic objection runs against the General Will, which means you're a counter-revolutionary that doesn't actually want to return us to the State of Nature. And these pragmatic demands are reactionary.
Or at least so says pure ideology.
If you want an ideological counter to this, you have to reach for Hobbes and become what Nick Land calls a "cold liberal" and reject the egalitarian and humanist part of the package to let markets and rationalism stand on their own. But then you are something different.
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