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Comment by TheBeardKing | Hacker News Reader

Poverty is not justification to excuse bad or illegal behavior. If you follow your line of thinking, you'd have to give someone a pass for just about any sort of environmental abuse, archaeological pillaging, improper waste management, poaching of endangered animals, etc.

At some point you have to draw a line. Must we solve global poverty at 100% before we enact environmental protections? Or should we allow the only habitable planet we have for generations to continue on a death spiral and explain to our great-grandkids "well people were poor..."

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Poverty is not justification to excuse bad or illegal behavior.

Entire books have been written on the very subject. Plenty of Russian works on the topic, though you might want to start with the classic primer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Mis%C3%A9rables.

Though I'm making my point in a trite way, I think the problem is that you want to start from the bottom up. Hugo, for one, brought to light that it is a multi-layered problem and starting at the bottom, though easy and most common, might not be the right approach.

So if you were starving to death, you wouldn't consider stealing some food to survive, but would hold firm to your principle "Poverty is not justification to excuse bad or illegal behavior"..and die? No. It sounds like the principle of someone who's never been near poverty.

In this world, being rich is more often the justification, if any were asked for, of bad and illegal behaviour, and on a grand scale.

You could just nuke all developing countries you don’t like.

Or pass laws saying that native peoples are non-humans and allowed to be hunted.

Or maybe enslave a bunch of people and pass laws that say it’s ok.

You might be confusing law with morality.

People gain a monopoly on violence and then pass “laws” which equate to “how you must act or we will hurt you”.

In your world, it seems that wealth is the excuse for bad behavior.

At the same time, completely ignoring systemic effects and saying "it's no justification!" certainly isn't the most effective approach.

There must be some sort of practical balance that we can look for.

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