This particular widow is now a single mother who has very little and only a very small life insurance policy and SHE has a moral obligation to look out for the interests of the credit card company?
Widows and orphans dude, you are taking the credit card company’s side against widows and orphans. You probably didn’t mean to but that’s where you ended up.
I hear you but this guy DIED. Most people don’t include dying in any definition of gaming the system. Money may be fungible but that credit card company extended credit on the dead husband’s ability to repay, they didn’t ask the wife to cosign, they didn’t rely on her ability to repay at all, they are getting what they expected. Now here she is, a widow raising a 6 year old and we already know she’s poor; and you think she should try to repay her dead husband’s debts?
Frankly, I could see how it would be immoral for a single mother to give money to a credit card company and then end up on welfare with a 6 year old child.
In THIS case you may be dead wrong. We are talking about a fucking WIDOW dude. You are barking up the wrong tree. If this were a case of some lawyer who decides that decides he is going to strategically default on his mortgage and force the mortgagee into a short sale and get away from his debt with nothing more than a black mark on his credit report then I’d be more sympathetic to your position. If this was some guy who blew his credit cards on hookers and booze and then reneged on his obligations then I’m right there with you. But when a recently widowed single mother of a six year old gets lied to about her obligations by a credit card company that tells her she owes them money that she could use to help raise her child instead of going on welfare, then you lost me.
Bad analogy – in that situation, you have legitimate recourse against somebody (usually the people who sold the item, maybe somebody else if it was damaged by circumstances beyond the seller’s control).
The notion that the credit card company should be entitled to collect money outside the circumstances spelled out in the contract and the laws under which the contract was made is closer to “Should I be able to get my money back from the CC company if I purchase green drapes on credit and then decide I like blue better?”
Actually, it seems to be more a point-and-laugh thing.
One might decide to do so out of generosity, but it makes no sense to assert that anyone has a “moral obligation” to reimburse the credit card company for a risk they willingly assumed and for which they have already been compensated via higher interest rates and fees than the market would bear if the debts had been secured.
Given that the credit card company in the OP of the earlier thread had apparently attempted to mislead the surviving spouse, I certainly wouldn’t consider her “morally obligated” to reward them by making their fraud attempt a success.
Actually, if everyone made their best effort to shove a shit sandwich down the throat of anyone who made fraudulent assertions in an attempt to collect nonexistent debts, then the world would be a much better, less expensive place.
So, clearly the operative “moral obligation” here is to punish the CC scammers to the greatest possible extent.
I don’t want to sound like a pinko commie here, but this kind of thinking–that a man’s legal relationship with a corporation should be based on the moral standards that a man has to other individuals, but that a corporation shouldn’t be held to those same standards–is exactly how the running dog capitalists keep the working class down. It’s this kind of thinking that has retail wage workers working off the clock because overtime “isn’t allowed” but “the store needs them” or leads people to turn down good jobs because they “couldn’t be replaced” and would be “abandoning their responsibilities” and then later are surprised and hurt when that same company lays them off. It’s blue collar masochism.
There are two types of relationships–business and personal. Personal relationships are governed by complex codes of behavior that are somewhat culture dependent but tend to include salt-of-the-earth values like “always pay your debts” and “always take responsibility”. Business relationships are governed by business law. We had to codify that law because corporations don’t have any person to have personal relationships with. It’s usually a very bad idea to do business with someone when you have a personal relationship, because then it isn’t clear which set of rules you are following.
In this case, the dead man and the CC company had a business relationship. They absolutely have the right to settle his debt from his estate. They do not have the right to go after money that is not in the estate (such as this insurance payout). They are pretending to have a personal relationship with the widow to get money from here, but it really isn’t: if they could just seize the money, they certainly would.
It’s ridiculous to say that she is obligated to follow the personal relationship code of behavior while they are allowed to follow the professional relationship code of conduct. That’d be like a footrace with one person wearing lead shoes.