https://www.lawlion.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/UPDATED-F...
When the author anonymously interviewed students, he gathered the following responses:
• “I totally have [taken things from a store downtown without paying for it].
I think I’ve stolen from Gibson’s twice. I took a packet of those noodles that come in boxes… It wasn’t expensive and I felt like it. I just preferred not paying for it, but I could have.”
• A female student admitted that she has stolen many things from Gibson’s Bakery and Ben Franklin’s. “I took a wine bottle. I had a large winter jacket and I put the bottle in the lining and I walked right out.” And, “I took pens from Ben Franklin because individually the pens cost $4 and I thought it was a racket.”
• “Probably [I have stolen from downtown] but let me think about it…yeah, no, I do that all the time.” The same student then talked about how they stole a one-hundred-dollar ($100) bottle of wine from Gibson’s Bakery.
• “I have stolen from Gibson’s, Kim’s, IGA. I took some dumb stuff. From Gibson’s I took some steak knives for an avocado that I also stole. I was really drunk and that was really bad.”
• “I think I’ve taken candy and just small shit from Ben Franklin’s and the Oberlin Market.”
• “[I have taken] a few pens from Ben Franklin over the years… they’re hard to resist.”
• One said she’s never paid for Chapstick while at Oberlin for four years.
• The author: “I myself have stolen from the very people I’ve interviewed for this story. I could have paid for the items easily, but I chose to steal them instead.”
This student and/or institutional attitude was supported by the statistics provided from the Oberlin Police Department of thefts at Gibson’s Bakery from January 1, 2011 to November 14, 2016. These statistics show that of the 40 adults arrested for theft during that time period, 33 of those adults (82.5%) were Oberlin College students.
The affluent, privileged Oberlin students profiled in the article don’t even feel shame about stealing from local small businesses. That suggests not only something about them, but the moral context they inhabit. And these are our next generation of leaders! What if we have made a mistake and ratcheting down punishments for theft had the effect of weakening social taboos against it? What if the students aren’t the product of something that can be called progress? What if the Saudis are on to something?
Are you just upset because you think corporal punishment for theft should be outside the Overton window and you assume I agree and am just being flippant? (And I’m not sure what the “ideological direction” here is. I’m pretty sure right wing people don’t think sharia gets anything right.)
I'm probably being too testy about this. There's been a pretty clear shift with your comments (people have emailed me about it out of the blue!) and it's been disappointing, in the sense that I have a rooting interest in people who contribute good stuff to HN continuing to do so, and not tearing the place down. But that's my problem, not yours.
To steelman your argument, you're concerned about proliferation of, essentially, tomfoolery and pilferage amongst the young. Because of changing or weakening of cultural norms, or because of some other reason (maybe poverty or class divides or some such explanation). I mostly share these concerns, to be honest, because in the last 2 years I've started to see the apathy present in younger co-workers that have joined the company I'm at. The problem I have with your comparison is that ... no one wants to be like Saudi Arabia except the Saudis. Older iterations of Civilization had much more draconian enforcement of law because, and this is just my personal opinion based on my own reading of history, the stakes were a lot higher. Stealing someone's coin or robbing them of their livestock literally killed the victim (usually very slowly and very very miserably), and so, in a way that I understand, it made sense for the penalty for such a transgression to be as or nearly as extreme as the cost to the victim.
I'm not sure what purpose it would serve to bring that back, since the stakes are demonstrably not that high. I realize you're not arguing for that, and are making a broader point. I'm trying to think of constructive ways to explain to these kids that "stealing is bad", but then I just realize that the problem isn't the kids, it's the Professors and the University, and redirect my criticism toward those institutions instead.
You have a point about abundance changing the balance compared to earlier eras. I’ll have to think about that.
My point about scarcity and material abundance isn’t that harsher penalties weren’t morally or philosophically justified. Just that it was much easier to do so when things were scarce.
I don't want to ban you and have no intention to, but you create a big problem for us if we ban people for comments like this and then an account like yours does the same thing. Users expect fairness. How am I supposed to answer them when they say things like "so it's ok if rayiner does it?"