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.
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.
"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."
But saying stealing is ok is wrong.
> 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
