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Say I do $500 worth of work for you and you pay me by giving me an old watch you had kicking around. If I discover that it’s actually a valuable watch and sell
by criddell 4y ago
Say I do $500 worth of work for you and you pay me by giving me an old watch you had kicking around. If I discover that it’s actually a valuable watch and sell it, should I have to return to you the excess over $500?
Maybe this is a bad analogy, but it’s the only argument that makes sense to me.
- Clamchop 4y agoI think giving versus taking materially changes the ethics of the scenario. If someone gives you something as payment, no strings attached and no misrepresentation, then it's a fair play. They gave you a watch as payment, they didn't ask you to sell it and pay back the difference. The debt is settled even if the watch isn't worth enough, because it was the payment, whatever its value ends up being. If you took the watch to repay a debt, then yeah, it's unethical not to pay back the difference. Thinking about it in the converse helps: if you took the watch and it wasn't worth enough to pay back the debt, you would probably insist they're still on the hook for the rest. Cuts both ways.
- criddell 4y ago> Cuts both ways. I think for property tax cases like this, once you forfeit the property the debts are cancelled.
- medvezhenok 4y agoSimilar questions have been litigated before, and the answer is not unequivocally no, contrary to what you might expect. It depends on whether you knew that what you were buying was worth more and whether you bought/got it with intent to deceive the other person about its true value (which is a hard thing to determine in the moment)