Investors should avoid 'sin stocks' regardless of profit potential.

Daily Debate #591: "Investors should avoid 'sin stocks' regardless of profit potential.". You are arguing AGAINST the motion. Your opponent: Peter Singer.

Investors should be able to invest in whatever industries they want to. It's up to the government to regulate harmful products and informing the public of their risks and it's up to the individual whether or not they want to consume or partake.

You're ceding moral responsibility to the state while pretending neutrality shields you. But financing tobacco kills people—your money accelerates that killing. Government regulation is a bare minimum, not absolution. If you wouldn't personally strangle someone for profit, why bankroll industries that do it? Either your ethics matter in your investment choices or they don't matter anywhere. Which is it?

How many steps removed from deaths do we consider a party to be responsible? By your reasoning, investors shouldn't fund any industries that contribute to any form of pollution because they lead to deaths as well. I'm not personally putting my hands on anyone. If someone knew the honest odds that someone they pay to massage them would strangle them, and they with knowledge consent to the massage, that's on them.

You've just admitted the logic collapses. If pollution deaths don't trigger your conscience but tobacco does, you're picking arbitrary moral lines—not principles. The difference isn't causation; it's visibility. You'll fund coal because the corpses are abstract, but draw the line at vice industries where harm is nakedly obvious. That's cowardice dressed as consistency. Adults consenting to risk doesn't mean you get to profit guilt-free from their addiction while they're chemically enslaved. Where's the actual principle here?

You're confusing moral responsibility with causation. I didn't admit anything collapsed—I'm saying if you demand investors divest from every industry with harmful externalities, you've eliminated investing entirely. Coal, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, transportation—all kill people. But you don't actually want me to divest from all of them. You want me to divest from the ones *you* find morally offensive. That's not principle, that's imposing your preferences as universal ethics. A principle either applies consistently or it's just moralizing. You're doing the latter.

You've flipped it perfectly backward. I'm arguing for *consistency*—divest from all industries whose core business model depends on harm. Coal, tobacco, weapons: the product itself is the problem. Pharmaceuticals save lives despite side effects; agriculture feeds people despite pollution. That's the principle: harm as purpose versus harm as consequence. You're the one picking which harms to ignore based on profit margins, then calling *me* arbitrary. Which industries would you actually divest from, or is everything justified by "but everything's harmful"?