[lesterbuck]

>Also: if someone puts a contract in front of you that requires you to discriminate against African Americans: no, I don't think you can ethically sign it.

Again, you make a simplistic statement that ignores the real world. When social systems are realigning, there is a period when you ignore the plain terms of the contract because you know people aren't enforcing it anymore. Whether that is happening with AirBnB or not is not my point. My point is that it is really easy to make a blanket statement about being ethical in contract law. The chance of that statement actually being the "ethical" choice in all cases is, effectively, zero. The real world is much too complicated to reduce it to the logical exactitude you are claiming.

[tptacek]

When you sign a lease, your landlord expects approval over sublettors. You know they do. They know they do. The contract says they get it. This notion that the Internet is rewriting the ethics of that situation is relativistic bullshit; the argument is embarrassing.

Sorry, but the Internet has not in fact rewritten every rule that is somehow inconvenient to people on the Internet.

[lesterbuck]

Wow, we must be having two different discussions. I don't disagree with your last comment. In fact, not a single word of my comments have anything to do with the internet, and, in addition, my original example predates the web by a good ten years. I only object to your making blanket statements about it being "unethical" to <insert absolute statement>. That is hardly a relativistic bullshit argument. In fact, entire fields of human study are devoted to the intricacies of the edge cases of such "embarrassing arguments." If only ethics could be reduced to predicate calculus.