Playing the Altruism Chip

Reliable Properties, the owner of a 24-unit apartment complex in Kansas City recently informed residents that their leases would not be renewed. The owner wants to renovate the units to take advantage of rising rents in the area.

Many of the residents are elderly and have lived in the complex for years. They are obviously unhappy that they will have to find a new home. In response, they have formed a tenants’ union and issued a number of demands to Reliable, including:

Reliable must renew all leases for one year and keep rents at the level they were on October 1, 2021

Reliable must guarantee an option to renew and commit to increasing rent no than 2%;

For those of us who would rather move due to the renovation, the owner must adhere to the following terms:

Reliable must guarantee tenancy through at least April 1, 2022, cancelling rent obligations between November 1, 2021 and the move out date; 

Reliable must return tenants’ original deposits in full, two week prior to a scheduled move out date; 

Reliable must provide relocation assistance in the form of $4,000, unrestricted, to each tenant who was displaced during the renovation process.

While this is certainly an impressive list of demands, one must wonder what motivation Reliable would have to meet them. The company has nothing to gain and everything to lose by doing so.

The only bargaining chip the residents have is morality, and specifically, altruism. Altruism holds that we have a moral duty to sacrifice for others. The tenants are counting on Reliable to accept this unchosen obligation. Ayn Rand called this the sanction of the victim, which Leonard Peikoff has described as:

The “sanction of the victim” is the willingness of the good to suffer at the hands of the evil, to accept the role of sacrificial victim for the “sin” of creating values.

But the altruism chip is effective only as long as Reliable accepts altruism as a duty and sanctions its victimization.

Reliable has a moral right to maximize its profits by trading value for value. It wants to increase the value that it is providing and wants to be compensated for it. Rather than appease the tenants, Reliable should proudly declare that it rejects the role of sacrificial victim.