The Totaled Wardrobe

Joe and Tina Shaffer in St. Paul write asking Cohen about their ruined wardrobe:

"While staining the frame of a mirror in our house on a hot day, a skilled but distracted worker had a large fan blowing on him. Behind him were thousands of dollars of our clothes, which ended up spattered with brown stain. Efforts to remove the stain were unavailing. The worker’s company deducted the cost of the clothes from our bill, then asked to keep them. We declined and plan to donate them to a charity. O.K.?" (The Ethicist, 1/25/09)

Cohen makes an argument from analogy that the Shaffers should be allowed to keep their clothes: "If you badly damage your car and put in an insurance claim, the insurance company doesn’t come by the house to pick up the debris. It is not buying scrap metal; it is making good your loss. The imperfect painter, same deal." But this is simply untrue! I know (unfortunately from personal experience) that this is precisely what many insurance companies do when a car is written off as a total loss. Companies will pay out fair market value for one's car in the case of a total loss. The insurance company will then keep the proceeds from a scrap sale of the car or its parts. What's more, if one is permitted to keep the car, the insurance company will pay fair market value minus what they would have made from the scrap sale. Now, this is not to say that Cohen is wrong that the Shaffers should be allowed to keep their clothing; but the analogy does not help. An interesting question: Does the fact that this is common practice among insurance companies help serve, minimally, to make the painters' request reasonable, regardless of what obligations one takes the Shaffers to have?