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"I simply cannot understand how people can say it's either immoral or unethical to walk away from a house."It's a social hack, leveraging legacy social behavior.
When loans were primarily between family, friends and neighbors who are not professional businessmen, the social pressure is beneficial to the community. If you took advantage of the lender, the community would be less cooperative in the future.
That no longer being an accurate description of most business deals, individuals are still encouraged to think of legal contracts as being akin to their social/moral 'word' (of honor). This gives an advantage to the businessman who treats it as a legal contract and nothing more.
The individual, once-convinced, will go to great lengths to ensure moral justice, dramatically mitigating the financial risk the businessman agreed to.
e.g. the mark is socially pressured to accept increasingly-onerous terms to try and repay a debt he 'swore' to repay; even though the contract clearly stipulates interest as the price of the businessman's risk in the first place.
Most people just don't realize their tradition is being used against them. The rest are encouraging the stigma because they like being paid interest for one risk level, but actually enjoying a much lower real risk.
See also: credit counseling and debt restructuring as new legal pre-requisites to filing bankruptcy. It dramatically lowered risk of lending, without any commensurate decrease in the cost of borrowing. Yet bankruptcy is still stigmatized as something that only happens to deadbeats and losers. The skyrocketing proportion of bankruptcies due job loss or medical costs are brushed under the rug. The price of interest being the bank's reward for accepting the risk of lending is brushed under the rug.