It’s easy, and occasionally fashionable, to bash neighborhood dissent to development as so much whining and NIMBY-ism. Complaints of density and height and scale bring comebacks of “anti-business” and “anti-progress.”

But it’s no small thing developers are doing when they enter a community. The larger a proposed project, the smaller the margin for error. There really is only one opportunity to get things right – buildings costing hundreds of millions of dollars tend to be rather permanent things in a neighborhood, after all. And when they don’t work out, the scars can linger for years (witness Filene’s).

Any development, but especially development on the scale proposed in Boston in recent years, carries with it certain unavoidable moral obligations. Development teams very literally intrude upon and disrupt the characters of the city blocks and neighborhoods they inhabit. Traffic is re-routed. Noise increases. Lives are altered.

With this intrusion come implicit guarantees that the end will justify the means. Really, all we can do once a project has commenced is hope this is true.

But when it isn’t, or when things don’t work out, we need to know that the moral imperative to make things right still exists. It shouldn’t be that hard to insert language into development contracts ensuring exactly this.

And yet, it isn’t happening.

Recently, the developers of the failed Columbus Center project informed state officials they’re out of money and can’t possibly pony up all the funds needed to clean up their now-abandoned construction site.

WinnCompanies and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, also known as Calpers, were supposed to build a mega-project complete with luxury residences and a hotel over the Massachusetts Turnpike. But earlier this month, Calpers officially pulled the plug on the ambitious $800 million project. The developers reportedly lost more than $125 million on this project.

Now, they’re telling the state that the entity they created to build the project has only $1.5 million to $2 million in assets remaining – too little to cover cleanup costs which could be as high as $5 million.

Legally, the state probably can’t collect from WinnCompanies and Calpers individually, only from the partnership created to develop the project. Holding companies are formed for exactly this reason, of course – as shelters from legal and financial obligations.

But freedom from legal and financial obligations does not, and should not, free developers from their moral obligations.

So while it may be impossible to force Calpers and WinnCompanies to pay for the entire cost of clearing their site, there must be some moral obligation to do so. And it’s a little hard to believe that they can’t cough up another $2 million or so to properly clean up the site.

WinnCompanies isn’t alone, of course. Vornado chairman Steven Roth started a firestorm recently when he said he might be content to let the bombed-out block that used to be Filene’s sit unattended as he waited for state funding to jumpstart it.

And in Fort Point, developer Archon has been sitting on a pile of warehouses for years, seemingly happy to let them sit vacant while the finer points of a proposal that flagrantly violates neighborhood zoning restrictions are argued by neighbors. After already profiting to the tune of $40 million when they flipped some of their holdings a few years back, some are accusing the company of waiting for the right moment to again do the same thing, and again profit handsomely at the expense of the neighborhood.

Money makes the world go around, of course, and we know that better than most. Developers aren’t in the game to win friends, per se.

But not making friends and not being neighborly are very different things. Some developers’ callous disregard for community opposition, or their legal ability to hide behind corporate shells, doesn’t shield them from the fact that we’re all in this together.

It’s our neighborhood too, after all, and we’re tired of seeing it torn up for no discernible purpose. In these cases, as neighbors, we must choose morality over money.