Is Ethical Divestment Possible?

David Boonin (University of Colorado, Boulder)

A common justification for ethical divestment rests on the claim that your owning stock in an immoral company makes you complicit in the company’s immoral behavior. But there’s something puzzling about this view. Suppose you own such stock. Ethical divestment requires you to sell it. If you sell it to someone, then they’ll own it. If it’s wrong to own the stock, then they’ll be doing something wrong. So if you sell someone the stock you own in an immoral company, you’ll be helping them do something wrong. And it seems wrong to help someone do something wrong. This seems to make it wrong for you to sell the stock to them. How, then, can a company’s immoral behavior make it wrong for you to own stock in the company but not make it wrong for you to get rid of the stock by selling it to someone else? How, in short, can ethical divestment be possible? I will discuss a variety of answers that have been offered to this puzzling question and propose an alternative response.