It's hard to see a victim here. The kid stole for the early access, he would have gladly paid for the game.
So really the rule he's intending to break is you know, "you're not allowed to look at this until X date"
The shoplifting is a byproduct.
I can see a gray area. There's a lot of stupid laws painted in black and white.
And in that thought experiment, I think things turn out really badly. Not only is it materially bad, a lot of society's trust is burned.
I think the only reason this person's actions are "okay" is because they are washed away by the sea of good people doing good things.
GP comment said "There's a lot of stupid laws painted in black and white.". I don't think Theft is one of those stupid laws. I think it's a good law.
If EVERYONE farmed, there would be waaaay to much food and no water left on the planet.
The GMO debate would have Facebook mom experts in every phpbb corner of the net.
Farmers Only would be the number one company on the planet.
In fact I would actually recommend, if feasible, to start a garden in their yard for staple veggies.
Just think how much energy we would save instead of shipping potatoes from Idaho or soybeans from China.
And everyone would be getting way better nutrition.
If everyone farmed a little bit, that would be amazing for our society and our planet.
This is only true if everyone had industrial sized farms. If everyone farmed the scale of the farms would naturally decrease in size. I'm not sure how one "scales" stealing games from Amazon.
Moral imperatives like this tend to apply to the domain of "duty". Is it a duty to farm? No, of course not; but that doesn't make it immoral to farm.
A hypothetical example of a "duty" might be "contribute to the economy". According to Kant, it is moral to do this as long as you'd like it if everyone did it.
Resale though is bad.
I also use this thought experiment (and it's what shapes my view that e.g. software piracy is in fact quite bad).
The thing is, in this case clearly not everyone could put this much effort into getting a copy of Zelda. Even if they had the free time, if Zelda was this valuable to everyone we would live in a different world (the game would cost more, there would be more games like it, etc).
This guy was just willing to go "above and beyond" for the game he likes... maybe not in the best way, but not in a harmful one.
On the nintendo side word of mouth spreads like hotfire. Remember Nintendo gives away games to writers to generate more word of mouth more press.
Sounds like a win/win
Change that to murder and your points become more valid.
In your scenario, Amazon would experience a boom of workers, then experience workers x unit cost theft, and then have 0 workers.
Too much rule adherence, resulting in too much trust can also have undesirable consequences, e.g.
From "Traffic safety and norms of compliance with rules:An exploratory study"[0]:
"We use a simple model of drivers’ vigilance effort choice to show that drivers’ propensity to follow traffic rules has two opposite effects on road safety. On the one hand, it lowers the frequency of dangerous situations. On the other hand, it also reduces drivers’ vigilance effort as each driver anticipates that dangerous situations will be less frequent. These two opposite effects may lead to a non-monotonic relationship between compliance with road rules and the incidence of road traffic accidents. We present cross-country estimates that support the existence of a bell-shaped relationship between norms of compliance with rules and traffic fatalities." [0]
First problem I see is that they use Road Fatalities as proxy metric for overall goodness.
If someone's driving drunk, and they run their truck into your living room at 2am - yeah maybe no one died, but a lot of damage and stress was caused. Not to mention just destruction in the form of minor accidents.
I simply cannot buy the conclusion - "Yeah it's a good thing we have a few drunk drivers". Call me anti science if you must
How misguided! Not only does this perspective indicate a lack of core values, it results in retail deserts as said corporations retreat from lawlessness. You'll be directly impacted when your neighborhood Walgreens closes.
Watch this video from yesterday: https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/13x3d7s/retai...
The main problem with this line of reasoning, and heck, the entire act of trying to weaken "stealing" in general, is that the overall result is that you now have more than 1 person stealing a nintendo. In fact because of the internet, things going viral, you might even have a double digit percentage of those nintendos, being stolen.
We build up and break down societies rules by things we do every single day. The more we break them down, the more we see crap happening. If everyone stole every nintendo, well, Good bye to Zelda in general. That company won't want to even make that game.
I totally agree with the part of the video that argued people so poor that they can't eat that it would be basically justified for them to steal bread at a large business. I think however it would be even better if that person tried to find as many legal options to do that instead. And in general, tried to get a job. If they're still capable of stealing, they can probably do a job somewhere. But yes, at the bottom, steal the loaf of bread, but don't stay there forever.
I looked further on a google search and found a Salvation Army link on free soup kitchens, clicked California, and couldn't find any of the Counties I'm near right now.
We don't even have a class in high school to tell people what to do if they find themselves poor. There is literally no training or help.
Motel dilemma's, they're the worst. Econo Lodge, Super 8 I never know what to do...
Oh wait, that's exactly what happened.
Stealing is wrong people. Retail theft is a huge problem right now, and now I understand why: I'm apparently in the minority for thinking this way.
And before you say anything about losing money from training the kid or turnover or whatever, Amazon's turnover is horrible. They're used to it.
If I steal a bums sandwich, I hurt him. If I steal Jeff Bezos' sandwich, literally nothing happens. There is no result. He never knew the sandwich existed.
Maybe you'll never have to steal a sandwich, but I hope if you do, you make the right choice.
What new draconian measures is Amazon going to institute now that the news has given thousands of asshats the bright idea that they can just get a job at a warehouse and walk off with goods?
I get that theft happens. I've worked in retail and my mother managed a large retail store when I was younger. So I also get that shit rolls down hill. These aren't "victimless crimes". Sure the company isn't effected that much (though, the stock prices of retailers effected by the recent thefts tell a different story), but employees get to share the pain. Managers lose out on bonuses (read: income) from this, and asshole GMs pissed off at missing targets take out their low-level employees.
I distinctly remember retail theft being a reason my mother switched careers. She'd tell me about how she just had to sit back and watch as people rolled TVs out of the store without paying for it and realizing that she'd be the one paying for it.
The more interesting question that occurs to me is - what is the optimal item to steal from an Amazon warehouse? Nintendo games actually seem like a decent size/weight/value ratio, but I'd bet there's much better. Obviously precious jewelry is a classic, but there might already be increased scrutiny on those. I'm sure some enterprising young go-getters will figure it out.
It would be tolerable if it was one or two people. But as recent news have shown once people see there is little consequence in stealing up to a certain amount then it emboldens people and it happens in large numbers.
So a bunch of mouth breathers think stealing from the rich corporation is ok. It happens in numbers and then draconian measures that punish employees and/or law abiding, tax paying and merch paying citizens are enacted.
Always.
So no, this shit ain't victimless in the long run.
And the worst part is that this mentality does not stop a big retail stores. This sordid mentality that it's ok to steal doesn't prevent thieves from stealing from smaller business that cannot handle the loss of inventory as easily.
These stores pay the ultimate price by firing staff and/or shutting down.
Why? Cause thieves rarely differentiate. If you steal that's pretty much your life. And that's your thing.
You don't think Amazon is doing anything unethical? Why, because everything it's doing is legal? Laws are not 1:1 with morals or ethics, that's why they change. But uh, I also feel the need to point out that Amazon does not operate according to the law any more than it can get away with[1]. So if breaking the law to steal value from thousands of employees/customers is ok, but breaking the law to steal one copy of a game is not... that's not a system of morality I want to live in.
[1] Amazon is not a law-abiding entity: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=amazon+broke+the+law&ia=web
Amazon steals from people all the time, they just call it good business practices instead of stealing.
Yeah? When "rich enough" literally means such an unfathomably large amount of wealth that it is effectively infinite for the person that holds it (which in this case it is, since Bezos will not ever scrape away even a fraction of his wealth in his lifetime), it pretty much is okay. Infinity minus one is still infinity.
To clarify, there are plenty of problems with theft such as how it can impact coworkers, and it's totally valid to be against theft. I am just very pedantically pointing out that yes, it is in fact not nearly as bad of a crime to steal from someone who is unbelievably rich.
I will always stop a person from robbing their neighbor. I will never stop a person from lifting from a mega corporation.
It pisses me off, of course. I've never prosecuted anyone though.
I have things that are not for sale, like decorations. Yes, it would be better if someone left the money when they stole it.
Then they're just buying an item I don't want to sell, I guess. It's way better, yes.
What would you do if a maid picketed up a penny? Probably wouldn't notice