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Comment by closewith | Hacker News Reader

The average citizen in every country is already willing to commit a crime. The difference between the average criminal and you is a couple of meals.

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This is completely untrue and does a tremendous disservice to the many impoverished people who do not become criminals.

> The difference between the average criminal and you is a couple of meals.

This is an insane point of view! Most criminals aren't stealing food.

No amount of missed meals will make me commit a rape, a murder, or other heinous crimes.

If you honestly believe this, you've never been truly hungry. Most to all people will kill for food.

There is a very famous American Buddhist monk called "Ajahn Geoff" who teaches this exact thing. Most people WILL commit heinous acts under the pressure of starvation. (And that's why he and other Buddhist monastics urge the taking of the Buddhist moral precepts).

While that's probably true, I don't really see its relevance. I'm fairly certain that exactly zero of the people spending prison time for murder in my country committed murder because they were hungry.

I'm open to the possibility that the situation may be different in other countries, but I strongly doubt it's a leading cause pretty much anywhere.

Well, as Lord Beaverbrook might have said, we've already established that we're all potential criminals. All we're haggling about now is the threshold that would cause us to commit a crime.

Without having lived the lives of others, you simply don't know if you would have committed the same (or worse) crimes in their situation. That doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't punish crimes, but to imagine that you're a better person than most criminals is just self-flattery.

Maybe not for you, but what if your son/daughter was missing meals? Moreover, you can see other people eating just fine, and no one will hire you? Also consider that the people you "murder" likely "had it coming" and were rapists, terrorists, blasphemers, or otherwise cultural heretics...until and unless you've been in those exact situations, it's incredulous that you'd not do what many other humans would do/have done.

People who say they wouldn’t murder people for food are saints. I would definitely do it. I like living more than I like other people living.

However, I wouldn’t murder anyone in anyone in a modern civilized society. Why not just use social services? And if that doesn’t exist, then steal. Even if you’re caught they’ll be obligated to give you food.

Society needs to devolve to far far below what is the US standard before murder becomes a reasonable solution to food problems.

So you steal and the person tries to murder you. Do you defend yourself? Even a push can knock the person over, hitting their head. Congratulations, you are a murderer.

I think it was pretty clear we were all talking about intentional crimes, not crimes of passion or accident or even negligence.

So unless I know the core of your argument, I’m not sure how to respond to this digression.

You don't know this. You can "imagine" how you'd react in a theoretical situation all you like, but It's like the first time you go skydiving - sure you know the safety record and you've got a parachute/reserve but until you get thrown out of a moving plane at 14,000 feet in the air, you have no idea whether you're going to react calmly or completely freak out.

Likewise until you're actually in a life and death situation, you don't know what you're truly capable of.

Not knowing the answer to these questions makes me wonder at who I am sometimes. How would I react to being thrown from a plane, a gun to my head, starving on the street. I thank God I haven't had to experience those things, but I still wonder at what kind of man I am.

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