As Zelizer (1979) points out, life insurance was in the early nineteenth-century United States seen as morally dubious: a profane intrusion into matters of God's will. Above all, life insurance had uncomfortable similarities to gambling: "the insured were seen as `betting' with their lives against the company" (Zelizer 1979, p. 151). By the end of the nineteenth century, driven in part by a shift in religious views from determinism to a voluntaristic viewpoint, life insurance had won cultural legitimacy, but gambling remained stigmatized and, in most jurisdictions in the US, illegal.
Nekas, lai cik lielisks un svētīgs tas būtu, man nesagādās prieku, ja tas būs zināms tikai man vienam. Ja man tiktu dāvāta gudrība ar noteikumu, lai paturu to sevī ieslēgtu un neizpaužu, es atteiktos no tās. Neviens labums nepriecē, ja tajā nedalās ar citu.
— Seneka, VI vēstule Lucīlijam
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