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Comment by look_at_me_ | Hacker News Reader

Morally bound? Ha. I once had debt collectors come after me while I was unemployed and living off savings and unemployment checks -- counting down the days until I would be homeless. The company in question attempting to collect the debt made over a billion in profits that year alone, while I owed them not even $200.

If anything, they were morally bound to forgive the debt in it's entirety. They could easily absorb the loss without even blinking, while the money owed meant the difference between being able to afford a few more weeks of food or begging for it.

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Unsecured debt backed by my full faith and credit are as secure as my ability to generate money.

If some personal or professional tragedy affected my ability to pay, there is a pecking order of things I will pay for, at that point, too bad, I'm insolvent.

There's no moral hazard if you borrowed money in good faith. It's not immoral to fail to repay a credit card if the alternative is to leave my family without some necessity.

This is especially true when your insolvency is the direct product of a criminal enterprise conducted by the lenders on such a massive scale that it threatened to wreck the entire global economy.

In other words, my obligation to pay is contingent on your not demolishing my ability to pay.

I'm surprised by how few people on HN feel contracts have a moral obligation aspect to them, but once you believe there is no morality in a legal contract, then a whole lot of things become permissible, specifically related to pirating and other kinds of legal trespasses.

Do you believe in individual responsibility, then? That is, if I, your friend, promise to give you a ride to the store and then don't follow through, am I morally culpable?

Individual responsibility cuts both ways. You are responsible for picking up your friend. Your friend is responsible for assessing your reliability.

I would argue that most people who think they're talking about morality are actually talking about risk.

You're not seriously debating the validity of the social contract with regard to banks that operated multiple interlocking frauds on such deep and massive scales that they just about wrecked the entire global economy, are you?

In situations like yours, I don't see any issue with going on a plan or letting them keep the juice running while you get back on your feet. But the idea that they were morally bound to forgive the debt because they're rich and you were poor is reprehensible.

>If anything, they were morally bound to forgive the debt in it's entirety

well, that's debatable. Imagine the consequence if agencies were obliged to forgo demands like that. They would do the opposite of what they set out to do, which they surely deem highly immoral.

Given the massive bailout provided by the taxpayers - to say nothing of total de facto immunity from criminal prosecution - yeah, writing off the economy-chocking overhang from the credit bubble is the least that should be expected.

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