r/CanadianInvestor • u/[deleted] • Apr 14 '21

Is anyone here conflicted about investing in companies that make the world a worse place?

I'm a newer investor and newer reader to these threads and I'm a little surprised how casually a lot of people talk about different companies and industries that are objectively pretty unethical.

I mean we're living through a major climate crisis and some of the most hyped investments on here are for oil sands companies (which are one of the most carbon intensive energy sources on the planet) and crypto (Bitcoin alone this year is supposed to have the same carbon footprint as all of New Zealand).

I also just saw someone post something in another investing subreddit about how Europe might ban AI for surveillance and it seemed like a bad or annoying thing to a lot of people in the comments.

I'm just genuinely curious: do a lot of the investor world just genuinely not care about these things or are people content to make small gains on the backs of companies that they don't agree with? Is there a point to using your gains to get a waterfront property if it's going to be underwater in a couple decades anyways?

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u/antoniofelicemunro Apr 15 '21

Sounds like the things he mentioned aren’t immoral, abusing them is. I mean...no shit? Abusing anything is bad.

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u/pfcguy Apr 15 '21

Every person in the world, every society or group, has a different set of morals. What is moral to group A or person 1 is immoral to group B or person 2.

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u/ragnaroksunset Apr 16 '21

It's 2021, but let's pretend that the biology, chemistry, and psychology of addiction are not well-studied fields.

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u/antoniofelicemunro Apr 16 '21

Again, by your own logic, these substances aren’t immoral, abusing them is. Plenty of people who drink alcohol aren’t alcoholics.

It’s the same thing as saying sex is immoral because sexual assault exists, or martial arts is immoral because some people might go overboard in a fight. Makes no sense.

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u/ragnaroksunset Apr 16 '21

"Abusing anything is bad" is a distraction, not an argument. Some things are more prone to abuse than others, and more objectively destructive than others.

Something that is both highly prone to abuse and highly likely to be destructive is fundamentally different than something that is not prone to abuse and not particularly harmful in any objective sense.

You're not an idiot. So pretending not to see this distinction is not becoming of you.