If you want to feel moral, go feed a poor person today. You'll feel much better. Don't assault the basic pillars of the civil society that is what has left you rich enough to be able to afford that without a second thought for a quick hit on the virtue pipe.
(Preempting one of the lines of attack I can forsee coming here, the crime is also minor and the penalty should be minor correspondingly. I would happily support some sort of very compassionate enforcement; perhaps a sentence of a few days' service at a soup kitchen which will also feed him or something. But there is still an important difference between enforcing the law even in this minor way, and declaring that certain people lack Privilege and therefore, ironically, have the privilege of being above the law, which is the sort of caustic poison that can dissolve civil society entirely.)
What history has to say is that, at many points, society has failed to provide help for the poor on a volunteer basis, and that said people have died of starvation and/or violated the law to avoid it.
If you expect that the normal order of things is for people to voluntarily donate in order to avoid hunger problems, then you have to admit that law and order will be broken on occasions, because the nominal food-providing mechanism occasionally fails.
Who cares about hypotheticals that don't apply to the current situation? Well, philosophers, sure, but it's a completely different question than what we're actually faced with here.
For the sake of my blood pressure I won't go into the similarly strange attempts to solve what systemic failures (almost always the ones that minorly inconvenience the privileged, isn't that strange?) folks of this mindset do deign to recognize, but...yeah.
It is never, ever ok to steal. Stealing from a supermarket is stealing from a person or people. Just because you cannot name who is affected doesn't mean it isn't people. It is black and white. The morality and legality are in alignment in this regard. This whole "shades of grey" leads to the blackness that destroys people and civilizations.
The whole point of government social programs is to provide for survival. There are organizations that provide and places to go.
That you believe this makes it absolutely impossible for me to think you're not in a privileged position.
> The whole point of government social programs is to provide for survival. There are organizations that provide and places to go.
Great when you know where to go, and they work as they should. They are not perfect. And people are not perfect. Especially not when starving.
Believe what you want, but I sure as hell didn't grow up in a privileged position.
> Great when you know where to go, and they work as they should. They are not perfect. And people are not perfect. Especially not when starving.
Churches will give food, its part of many faiths. Stealing is wrong, and brings misery to others. People will help others, but taking is never right because of the chain of pain you unleash in the world. Whose privileged when you can decide to take from others?
I think the disconnect there is that we appear to have very different ideas of what is required to be privileged.
Have you ever starved? (And going hungry is not starvation).
> Churches will give food, its part of many faiths.
Again, have you ever starved, and tried to think clearly enough to find someone willing to give you food?
> People will help others, but taking is never right because of the chain of pain you unleash in the world.
If the choices is theft of necessities or starvation, I would always consider theft morally acceptable, because the pain involved is magnitudes apart from the pain caused by petty theft.
I've gone hungry and I know my Dad did. There was choices made by this person before they hit starve. They were hungry first.
Why is visiting a church or other organization unacceptable to you?
Going hungry and starvation are two vastly different things, both physiologically and mentally.
> There was choices made by this person before they hit starve.
And these choices were insufficient to save him. So now what? Do you want him to starve to death because he was unable to fix things? Are property rights for a few euros worth that much to you compared to the well-being of a fellow human?
> Why is visiting a church or other organization unacceptable to you?
If you think that is what I said, you did not understand what I wrote.
> If you think that is what I said, you did not understand what I wrote.
I cannot think otherwise because you seem to say that stealing is still the only means of survival. I offered what this person could do instead of stealing. Stealing is still not the only solution.
My point, which you still do not seem to understand, is that someone who is starving is not in a frame of mind where you can expect them to be able to calmly and logically go through the available options, weigh them, find the most moral one, and execute on it.
Hence why I asked if you have ever experienced starvation rather than just hunger.
To me the above ranks with the (admittedly apocryphal) "let them eat cake". Technically, yes, he "could" have done many things.
No, hell no. Its not let them eat cake. Its there were other ways to save yourself and not cause pain to others.
In other words: You still don't understand what I wrote above, and you're still talking from privilege.
I think stealing is wrong, no matter the situation and desperation. However, I also believe that the supermarket (or whoever was stolen-from) has the right to compassion for this individual. And if you ask me, I believe people are generally good, and most would forgive the transgression without hesitation.
But saying stealing is ok is wrong.
There are certainly people in this world who would sit on top a mountain of food that will spoil if not eaten a foot away from a starving dying man and tell him he's not allowed to have any because they'd like to watch him suffer.
In that case stealing is quite alright by me.
Hell, there are people in this thread who would apparently play the role of the foodpile guy because of their intensely, sincerely held moral conviction!
> I think stealing is wrong, no matter the situation and desperation.
So you put property rights above the life of someone else?
Personally I find such an attitude incredibly offensive.
"Both very busy, sir..."
"Those who are badly off must go there."
"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."
"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
Nuance always matters. Context always matters. You won't derive meaning without them. (And if you aren't trying to derive meaning from something, if you're just aiming for the reptile-brain blood rush of Airing That Opinion--frankly, there are easier methods to replicate that that don't involve bothering other people.)
And while I am emphatically not accusing you of anything in your post, my experience has led me to the rule of thumb that the fear of such a rhetorical dismissal, as you expressed, stems from a desire to dismiss out of hand something challenging. It is in almost every case I can think of a do-unto-others-before-they-do-unto-you defense (even when, as is generally the case, nobody's doing unto you in the first place), so I'd personally think pretty hard before being too holy about it and telling vidarh what's frowned upon here.
Do you really think it's important whether this particular poster is 'privileged'? If it came out that she were actually a poor trans orphan who grew up starving and had a severe physical disability, would it change the discussion? What if he were a 22 year old tech bro with a rich dad who chugs beer and red bull and harasses women in his spare time? Are the points he made less correct now? If you think so, you should reconsider how you evaluate arguments, discussions, perhaps words themselves. Does it matter for any real purpose of the discussion other than to help you condescendingly armchair-psychoanalyze him (as you have with me) and tell him that his background is why he believes what he believes, and that he just doesn't really understand and never can?
The beauty of discussions online (and there are plenty of drawbacks as well of course) is that you can express yourself, state an opinion, have a thoughtful discussion with others without people hating or dismissing you for who you are; only what you say. That's why most forums don't have a "real names policy". That's why most forums don't have a 'privilege-meter' next to usernames that uses a sophisticated algorithm to measure how many disadvantages a person has been through, spitting out a final number that tells us how seriously to take her posts. This kind of unsolicited digging into a person's personal life is generally frowned upon in any online discussion forum.
I'd argue that seeing the world in black and white is what destroys people and civilisations rather more.
Many of the worst abuses of history have come from black and white thinking (people with black skin are not people, jews are not people, people without my political beliefs are not people).
That's a crap argument, and has nothing to do with morality that's base racism and can be just as easily phrased as some shades of grey. I'm getting sick of people twisting what people say into some racial thing when we are talking about concepts and morals.
Every time someone says "the end justifies the means" or "well, its really not that bad" or "I'm not cheating as much as them" makes the world becomes a worse place. Keeping your morals and doing the right thing benefit everyone.
"La Propriété est elle juste?" - Proudhon
Every society has a law like "no murder -- except sometimes, when you can".
And a law like "no stealing -- except sometimes, when you can".
And sometimes trying not to cause pain does make the world a worse place. Would you have police officers try their hardest to avoid causing pain? Criminals feel quite a bit of pain when they are incarcerated.
Nothing in the world is ever so simple as you suggest.
We can describe two different acts with the same word:
> A guy stole a sandwich from a super market because he was starving > A guy stole a Ferrari because he always wanted to drive a Ferrari
These two things are not the same.
The temporality of property rights is especially interesting. I hope you do realise that at some point in time there were no humans, and as such no such thing as property rights.
When a human first laid claim on a stretch of land, you could argue that this in itself constituted theft, at this very moment this person deprived every other human being from accessing or cultivating this land. What moral right did this person have to claim this land?
From there, millennia of war and conquest, laws and civilization.
In Switzerland, where I'm from, patrician families still hold vast estates, dating back to feudal times. They legally own all of this but what about the morality of it? These estates were acquired centuries ago.
By modern standards, the morality of it back then was clearly not given, because the wealth was amassed on the back of a populace in servitude. Add to this, that this has an impact on society today, by extension these inherited properties are limiting today's generations to express themselves.
In many countries, including Switzerland, there are of course specific laws that recognizes that property rights does not extend to full monopoly rights on land use.
I'm from Norway, and the Nordic countries in particular have very extensive exemptions to private property rights that recognises that there are certain rights to land use, as a limited and fundamental resource, that are held in common irrespective of property rights.
Sweden has this baked into the constitution. Norway until the late 50's I think did not have a law mentioning this right as it was considered so fundamental that it was long considered unnecessary to codify and courts would apply the principles anyway (this may not sound unusual from a common law perspective, but Norwegian law is a codified system of the Scandinavian model that evolved from Germanic law with Napoleonic influences, not at all a common law system) - the way you don't specifically cover the right to freely breathe the air.
In Norway (and it's much the same in Sweden and Finland), this e.g. means that outside of urban settlements you don't need to ask permission to walk through a privately owned forest, or across a field, for example (though you may not walk across cultivated fields other than when frozen). Even if fenced in. Nor is the land owner entitled to stop you or erect barriers to prevent you access (that does not mean barriers are illegal if they have reasonable purposes, such as e.g. keep wild animals out, but there'd be expected to be gates etc. allowing access). You can pick berries or mushrooms etc. for your own consumption but not hunt without permission. You can camp. There are limits, but they are in line with what you would expect of considerate campers. It is also generally considered rude to e.g. camp right outside someone's garden without introducing yourself and asking, even if on land you may technically have right to camp on. There is a general zone of 100m along the shoreline that it is not normally permtted to build on, even if part of your property (though exemptions are granted, with the caveat that it is still not permitted to prevent access or usage of the immediate shoreline no matter how close you've been permitted to build).
This is considered so ingrained in our culture that it is (or at least was when I was a kid) taught repeatedly in primary school.
Fencing off or otherwise trying to restrict access to "utmark" ("outlying land"), even if it is your own property, is not just legally restricted but considered reprehensible and morally indefensible to the point where it regularly causes major outrage if someone is trying to push the limits (or e.g. if particularly extensive exemptions are given to build near the shore).
I still get this deep instinctual feeling that it's wrong when I e.g. walk along the Thames path and encounter gates that gets locked at certain times, or when I come across park squares with fences all around.
I don't think people who have only ever lived in places where they encounter this regularly even understands how liberating it feels not to be locked in like that...
Yes, well they're stealing from someone, aren't they? But of course, it's ok if someone steals from the heartless grocery store owner, isn't it? I feel as if you would have a different opinion if anybody was allowed to walk into your house without your permission and ransack your fridge (and anything else they felt that they "need").
The moral problem with theft isn't that it is illegal. The problem is that one person expended their own personal resources to create the good. The person has spent their own time, money, and/or intelligence to create some good that now has value. The thief, who has expended zero effort to create nothing, takes the fruit of the producer's labor for no work, on the basis of his "need". What kind of society does this produce, where you can take things from others solely on your basis of need?
You seem to be making the cliche mistake of associating morality with need. I hope one day you don't need to learn this isn't always correlated...
Am I not privileged enough to have an opinion that theft, as such, should not be tolerated?
I still think that we should collectively help people who are in risk of starvation.
What kind of environment do you partake in discourse in that this kind of condescending contribution is acceptable? It sounds like you're taking your cues from the Comic Guy from The Simpsons. "Tu quoque? yawn".
Black and white thinking can, sure, be a result of privilege, but it can also be a product of its absence. Aside from being fallacious to attack a speaker for your presumption of what in their background might be the motivation for their ideas rather than addressing the ideas themselves, you'll also quite often be wrong on that presumption.