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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?

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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?

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