STUDENT VOICES | THE 2025 CHYNN ETHICS PAPER – honorable mention essay

Abandoning Ethics, Abandoning Renters

By
Nicholas G. Meetze,
Gabelli School of Business 2027

The rental housing market is a byproduct of society’s moral values on the intuitive right to commodify one’s possessions. As Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick argued, one must be allowed to do as one sees fit with their property (Nozick, 1974).

Market transactions are not entirely without limits, and this intuitively makes sense to most consumers. Certain transactions are barred because we as a society see the sale of those goods as unethical (i.e. drugs, hazardous waste, human organs). This limit on what is allowed to be bought and sold stems from the ethical issues that arise from commodifying those goods. The commodification of goods that facilitate exploitation, rights violations, harm, and other socially unacceptable outcomes result in market limitations. Intuitively, people understand the sale of certain items as morally wrong and thus accept the government’s role in banning subsequent goods.

For example, if someone were to sell a human kidney, it is only natural that one would ask where that kidney came from or how it was obtained. Ethical questions arise in the case of a, Abandoning Renters kidney sale: was it obtained forcefully via coercion, irresponsibly harvested from an individual looking to make ends meet, or donated? These questions suggest the necessity of a situational ethical approach: under certain conditions, organs sold and transplanted consensually would be unproblematic, but this commodification can also facilitate unethical transactions. For example, an individual without any alternative might be pressured to sell their kidney to pay off debts. In this scenario, the transaction would be harmful and exploitative, even though other perfectly consensual organ transactions may take place. The issue is that situational ethics is not easily translated to the institutional context of regulation. Individually reviewing the ethical permissibility of each transaction is not institutionally viable because an institution cannot involve itself with the unique circumstances of every transaction. Thus, the accepted response is to simply ban the sale of goods that lead to intolerably unethical transactions. (Intolerance is a threshold that can vary among communities). There exists an understanding that one’s individual market sovereignty shall be justly infringed upon, should the infringement prevent unethical market transactions.

The limits reflected in institutional rules are a product of society’s ethical values. Society attempts to operate along some ethical rationale. If commodification of a good facilitates unacceptable outcomes, then the commodification is unacceptable. But, as I will argue, the rental market illustrates a failure to adhere to this rationale, where unethical parameters arise, but rental housing is still deemed acceptable to commodify.

I will argue that this ethics-guided practice of barring certain transactions to prevent unethical commodification is collectively abandoned when applied to the rental market. Where within organ markets, the issue is the dynamic between vulnerable sellers and organ brokers, in rental markets, it is the fact that the landlord is distinctly favored (Zimmer, 2017: 51). I will, Abandoning Renters focus on the rental market, where rental agreements serve as a method by which renters can obtain housing services while the landlord is the benefactor of the economic returns (University of Cambridge, 2024).

In the case of the landlord-tenant relationship, a renter’s need for a home gives the landlord transactional power over the buyer. One might suppose that landlords and tenants occupy symmetrical sides of a transaction: the renter’s market for housing is the flipside of the landlord’s market for renters. However, renters are not similarly situated to landlords because they face constraints by which landlords are not bound. Renters encounter limited market availability, the pending termination of their current lease, and a budget. On the other hand, unlike tenants who are forced to take the best rental property given their constraints, landlords can wait out the market. Landlords have the luxury of being extremely selective, while tenants are forced to make difficult decisions to remain housed.

It is reasonable to assume that any rational tenant would take any rental unit over houselessness; thus, every renter is forced to engage in some level of pragmatism to find a home. This pragmatism is necessitated by (the threat of) houselessness, and thus rental transactions favor landlords. The looming possibility of houselessness puts the majority of tenants at a bargaining disadvantage with landlords (Radin, 1986: 379-380). The disadvantageous position of tenants gives landlords greater market freedom, allowing for freer choice and navigation within their market for tenants.

This asymmetry in choice, or as I will phrase it, asymmetric forced pragmatism, creates the inevitable existence of “desperate exchanges” (Walzer, 1983). Walzer, a notable American political theorist, utilized this term to describe exchanges where one agent’s dire need for a good is inappropriately advantageous to the supplier (Walzer, 1983: 100). These power dynamics are inappropriate because a buyer needs certain necessary goods. What differentiates desperat exchanges from other exchanges is that the buyers are left with no viable alternative in a desperate exchange. Without any viable alternative, sellers receive a transactional advantage, as seen in the case of the landlord-tenant relationship.

With rental transactions described as a form of “desperate exchange,” they can be expressed as exploitative. An exploitative exchange occurs when Group A provides something to Group B, but Group B is vulnerable to Group A in a manner that allows Group A to benefit from that vulnerability (Zwolinski et al., 2022). We can see within the landlord-tenant relationship, landlords provide something to tenants, but tenants are vulnerable to landlords. Houselessness is the only alternative for tenants, and as a result, landlords benefit via a transactional advantage over tenants. The existence of tenants’ vulnerability to landlords makes these rental transactions exploitative and, therefore, unethical.

Cases of similar circumstances raise related questions of ethical permissibility. Is it moral to keep a child from its mother after birth if the mother fails to pay the medical bill? Is it ethical to ask a starving child to pay for their lunch? These transactions are wrong for similar reasons. But here, I am concerned with the fact that tenants in the rental market are poised disadvantageously, where the only means of equalizing their bargaining power is accepting houselessness as a viable alternative to asymmetric transactional circumstances. This reality, in which every rational tenant would accept a nonideal lease before houselessness, creates transactions founded on unethical background parameters. This means that all rental arrangements entered into by tenants are exploitative. It is not just the unhoused who are victims but also renters who successfully find a tolerable apartment. Transactions that occur against unethical background parameters are still exploitative.

If rental housing transactions are unethical, the question arises: Why has society failed to limit the market? A full in-depth response to this question goes beyond the scope of this essay, but an answer can be seen in another highly regarded societal value: property rights. Our society views property as an extension of oneself. The societal value placed on property often subdues contrasting ethical intuitions because property is viewed as a basic extension of the individual (Locke, 1690). There exists the intuition that one’s decision to commodify property is inherently ethical because that individual is choosing to give up a basic extension of themselves.

This value explains why society has failed to impose limits on the rental housing market. In the case of rental housing, society has forgotten the familiar and accepted idea that individual market sovereignty should be infringed if it would prevent unethical market transactions. Instead, it sees rental property uniquely as an extension of the individual. And this perception has taken unfortunate precedence over our established ethical compass. Society usually allows for market limitations in order to prevent unethical transactions but has failed to do so in the rental housing market. This social failure to impose limits has perpetuated a rental market that continues to leave renters allocating larger and larger portions of their income to find a tolerable place to live.

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For more information about the prize, past winners, and submission requirements for 2026, please visit the Chynn Ethics Paper Prize webpage. The deadline to submit is TBD and is open to ALL undergraduates.

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References

Iglesias, T. (2007). Our Pluralist Housing Ethics and the Struggle for Affordability. Wake Forest Law Review, 42(1), 511–593.

Locke, J. (1690). Second treatise of government (C. B. Macpherson, Ed.). Hackett Publishing.

Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Blackwell.

Radin, M. J. (1986). Residential Rent Control. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 15(4), 350–380.

University of Cambridge. (2024). “Rent | definition in the Cambridge English dictionary”. Cambridge University Press & Assessment. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/rent

Walzer, M. (1983). Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality. Basic Books.

Zimmer, T. (2017). GENTRIFICATION AS INJUSTICE: A RELATIONAL EGALITARIAN APPROACH TO URBAN HOUSING. Public Affairs Quarterly, 31(1), 51–80.

Zwolinski, M., Ferguson, B., & Wertheimer, A. (2022). “Exploitation”. The Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2022 Edition). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.