blarghly@lemmy.world 2 days ago
No, not at all.
A parallel analogy I see here all the time: driving cars is bad for the planet. It contributes to climate change. So should you give up your car for the sake of the climate? No - because if you live in an auto-dependent area (which is a lot of affordable areas), then you need a car to effectively live your life. To have a job, go to the grocery store, spend time with friends, etc. The problem is the structures and incentives which don’t appropriately dissuade people from driving and provide alternatives. You as an individual giving up your ability to transport yourself will have an entirely negligible impact on the climate while severely hampering your life. It makes total sense to continue driving a car while advocating for better climate policy.
Similarly, owning a handful of rental properties has no impact on the housing market, but choosing to eschew this potential source of revenue could severely hamper your future finances. If you don’t buy these properties as rentals, odds are, someone else will. Your noble intentions will lead to exactly the same result, except you are worse off. On the other hand, if you do take action and buy these rental properties and rent them out at a fair market rate, you can be a good landlord - someone who is communicative about issues and prompt about fixing things when they break. And you are stopping a corporate buyer from owning the property and being a shitty landlord. While you do this, you can also advocate for better housing policy, which is the lever to pull to actually solve the problem.
Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
You could make a lot of these same arguments for owning slaves. If you don’t buy them then someone else will, and they may be a worse master then you. Better that you buy them and treat them right, provide them good food and housing, while at the same time advocating for the abolition of slavery.
In both secenarios you may say you want what’s best for them, but that desire is in direct conflict with your desire for profit so either you become a bad investor or a bad slave master / landlord. Why bring yourself into that conflict instead of investing in something without those moral implications?
blarghly@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I feel like this is a reasonable counterargument. My response is that you can reasonably and ethically seek a profit with real estate investment because pieces of land are not people. And any harm you do to people is going to be extremely distributed across the population. Like, if you went around to everyone in your city and whistled an annoyingly saccharine tune next to them while they walked to work on a Monday morning, maybe the total negative utils would add up to a single human life of slavery - but I still think distributed harm is far more justifiable.
nimpnin@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
It’s a gradient of more or less unethical things. You could also use the slavery analogy to less and less unethical investments, to reach the conclusion that you shouldn’t invest in anything that you have even the most miniscule ethical issues with.