Insofar as Robin Hood is one of the most popular heroes of all time in "western" mythology, it's probably not very hard to find people who agree.

But of course, this is one of the big reasons why we have laws, because people do not always agree on whether some given action is wrong, so we use a common denominator, make it illegal and try to ignore what individuals think. Which is pretty nice, since it also protects you from people who think that taking your stuff is completely fine.

If we're looking for limits, I find nothing immoral about stealing to survive, as long as you don't deprive someone else of their chance to survive. Other than that, I think laws against theft make a lot of sense, even though it might protect "nefarious people". Supporting the law being deployed doesn't necessarily mean always being happy with the outcome. That's a privilege usually only reserved for despots.

That said, I think it is time white collar crime is punished more harshly and investigated with more vigilance, similarly I think money gives too much legal power in the courts. Wealth bringing undue power to political and arenas is an issue that should be resolved. It doesn't take a genius to see that the combination of financial crimes being investigated poorly, punished leniently and wealth giving you excessive legal defenses is a poor one. I just don't think the key to this issue is to turn a blind eye to theft.

It's a silly question but I was specifically asking him because I am sure that he would also consider software companies circa 2021 and multi national corporations to include the uglys which I can understand but I feel Hue isn't saying that because he just feels resentful of folks with more money.

alarming footage captured the moment a brutal robber....

lol super brutal that one.

Great post. Thread has prob run its course after this, so lock it if you want.

Yeah, I guess if you don't get round to the giving it to the poor part, the stealing from the rich is probably not so magnanimous.

Monte had a great post earlier ITT as well. Monte - only reason I didn't respond is that there is not much to say.

It is wrong to steal, regardless of how much wealth your victim has. As to what to do with the banking executive, it depends on what you mean by "nefarious dealings". If he has amassed his fortune through crime then the redress should be the legal system and he should be forced to pay restitution to his victims.

It is important to note that Robin Hood did not "rob from the rich and give to the poor" but rather he helped peasants reclaim their own wealth which was unjustly taxed by the Sheriff of Nottingham.

I want opS password

Bro the rich don’t pay taxes while middle classes get ***. Seems to me reclaiming from the rich is fair game. Law makers can close the loops holes but they are gaining from the rich so they don’t, so f them. Listening to my own moral standards

I'm grunching, fwiw. IMO you can think about this sort of question more productively by thinking about morality as primarily a problem of social coordination and cooperation, rather than as a way of classifying individual acts as good or bad. So more politics than morality in the religious sense.

In that context, one reason why you might hold that it's immoral for you to individually steal from your hypothetical executive is that it's difficult to rationalize as a general policy without disrupting the social order more than is desirable. This is more or less the stock argument against vigilantism, right? While it may seem more or less just in the abstract, the cost of the rule ("it's OK to steal from unscrupulous bank executives") is perceived to be too high to be tolerable. Maybe that isn't true, I'm not sure I'm aware of any societies which we could use as an example of the counterfactual. But I think that in itself illustrates the point that a preference for a coherent social order is pretty widely shared. I think part of the explanation for this is that it just makes the world more easily navigable and more predictable when people adhere to these kinds of norms, in comparison to a world with more vigilante-esque justice.

This preference explains why most people consider it to be morally permissible for the state to take from this person via taxation, or through some other legal or criminal proceedings. Institutionalized actions are granted a legitimacy that individual actions don't have (and that's a big part of what "institutionalization" really is, sociologically). That wouldn't make sense if you think of moral questions as purely individual.

Agreed but if you believe the "institutions" are coopted and corrupted and being used as a tool to disadvantage, don't you almost have an obligation to fight back? To become that vigilante if the State is the one doing the unjust killing? To be Robbin Hood if you have the power?

I dunno if you have an obligation or not. I suppose if you think the established institutions are corrupt then you probably have to try to decide what the best route is to changing them? I also don't know what that is. I have some minimal confidence that I can explain (in part, at least) why we generally recognize the moral distinction the OP is asking about. I don't have a good normative theory of social change.

My vague perception is that normally big changes come about in part because of social movement organizing and action. Certainly various kinds of norm-breaking are part of social movement action (in many different forms), but there again I think the important part is maybe less what you do individually, and more what you can persuade others to also do? Of course sometimes individual acts become powerfully symbolic and accelerate movements, but that's hard to predict...

I think you have misidentified the enemy. The problem isn't "the rich", especially not people like Bill Gates who made their fortune through the market economy. The problem is people who get rich through the state, like politicians and bureaucrats, because their wealth is obtained by plundering the economic class. In the market economy, interactions are mutually beneficial. We trade because we expect to benefit, and we are almost always right in our expectations because we are uniquely situated to determine whether or not a trade benefits us. This is in contrast to the state, where interactions are win/lose, where one party benefits but only at the expense of another.

The state is a nothing more than a criminal organization, and if an individual can evade their extortion, then all the power to them.

Let me put it this way.

My bike got stolen recently. I was pretty bummed out about it.

But I think whoever stole it was more happy to get it than I was sad to lose it. The total happiness in the world increased.

So, whatever

This seems like a very long winded way to say "there is no honour amongst thieves". And there is, actually.

I do like how this thread has got at least 3 dormant posters out of their cubby holes though!

This very good. Peopel focus far too much on individual actions which unless you subscribe to some absolute morality theory, has a different answer for everbody. Immoral for me to steal doesn't make it immoral for D2.

Rather the idea is to try to organise the world in a way that both mine and D2's morality (and everybody elses) is optimally reflected in the real world. Fortuanately as we're nearly all human (or all nearly human) our moralities coincide quite a lot so the problem really reduces to standard political arguments. i.e what do we think should be theft, how should we decide between competing views and how should we then enforce it.

This sort of idea comes up a lot in the ever popular moral dilemma questions. The real moral question is how to avoid these dilemmas happening in the first place. What you do when they do happen it generally doesn't matter much as the harm is already baked in. As one of Chezlaw's law points out - there are no very difficult moral dilemma decisions. If it's that hard then you do as well tossing a coin.

I know there are certain posters who recoil and argue against using extreme hypotheticals to test the core logic of a position but there is a reason it is one of the first things you are taught to do in a debate study class.

That is to see if your core foundational logic is actually true (true in all circumstances) or situational true (only true 'if').

In all cases I think it is the proper way to first view things before getting more specific. To determine if an objective truth exists or is this all subjective opinion?

The TS posits a question which is an absolute. Is theft always "immoral"?

Tested with the absolute , 'If Kim Jong Un took control of your country and you were stealing both to survive and to slow him obtaining complete power over you', I think most instantly see that 'no, it is not immoral to steal' as absolute.

So the question answered then becomes subjective or a gradient or situational question where each situation needs to be defined to be answered.

What if instead it is a Donald Trump type who has all the same Despotic ambitions but operates within the system. He is able to change laws and subvert via those means instead? So his actions while challenged remain legal, as he has taken control of the courts.

I think that tips far more into slippery slope territory as so many people have adopted a stance that 'as long as it is legal, then it is right', they might think that sucks and the system is tilted or coopted against them but 'oh well, that is the law'.

But that is where i now start to diverge because I do not see 'control of the law' as in any way tied to 'moral' or 'just' outcomes and in many cases it is quite the opposite.

Agreed. The concept is one that makes people challenge their own ideas and is a good thought experiment.



Back in the day on the Rotten Tomatoes Forum we had a thread dedicated to Moral Dilemma questions. Each question was left for a week and then a new one posed.

It was fascinating seeing people who thought they had clarity on a question and could offer an instant answer ('it is always wrong/right') and how that would fall apart and how they would handle that when challenged on the extremes of their position.

Of course, we had the issue there like here where many people do not understand or reject the idea that consistency in view (even at the extremes) is necessary if one is to assert a position ('stealing is immoral and wrong') as an absolute, but thankfully most of the top posters there knew that truth so it was not too big an issue.

it was my favorite thread.

I actually don't think it matters very much at all whether the thieves have honor. What matters is that their actions are perceived as illegitimate, and legitimacy isn't really derived from trustworthiness. For example, I'm pretty sure there are few institutions viewed as less honorable or trustworthy than Congress, but very little question about the legitimacy of legislative acts. There is something bureaucratic about this -- legitimacy resides in the role (the office, title, ...) more than the individual.

There's also this enormous structure or apparatus that surrounds the institutions and routinizes their legitimacy, in the sense that there are many people who understand how to act in their "official" roles in relation to the institution. This is also true of law enforcement or the legal system in general.

My main point is that it's the social process of legitimation that matters to how we actually think about these things, more than the individual traits of actors. Hence I think it's wrong to read it as "no honor among thieves."

It's a fine and interesting place to start but you need to undertsand that it's a starting point and many move on from it. Some of us decades ago.

As I reguarly point out - DS can create a hypothetical where I would do any X but that doesn't actually negate my claim that X is wrong.

The recoil you see btw is that people know they are being sold a pup even if somee ont know why (I've mentioned DS so I should say I dont think that's his intention). It's no justifcation of tortuere that we can easily create a hypothetical where we do would torture someone. I also enjoyed zeno's paradoxes but if the logic convince you that the rabbit wont overtake the turtle then you have a problem with logic.

People btw get very attached to very simple meanings of words and stopping at logic 101. That's why some of us recoil fom debate club level. That is usually how it starts but then as we develop a deeper understanding of morality, some can't (or wont) distinguish that from 'squirming' to use a recent favorite description.

BTW the non simplistic moral stuff was discussed for many years in SMP. Some say it may even predate Plato who of course famously wrote a book that had a bit to say on whether it was right to obey the law. Not sure we have progressed much since socrates died.

Right.

But the entire point is to establish if "X is wrong" or "X is 'A' wrong".

Many people confuse the latter with the former and think they have a winning argument by simply stating something like 'theft is wrong' as a 'full stop' counterpoint that they think wins the debate.

When they are then challenged with more extreme hypotheticals they say 'ok that theft is ok', 'that one might be'.

The disconnect comes when people don't then accept that there foundational position is wrong/flawed and they still insist there comment/position is correct because somehow those 'extreme hypotheticals are not the same as what they are saying'. They fail to realize that they don't have to be the same. The underlying logic is applicable or its not is all that matters. And if its not the issue then becomes 'situational' and the case must be made on the individual merits and not some blanket 'truth' statement.

I've always found that is one of the toughest things to get people to understand and accept.

That mistake happens but beyond that people who grasp that problem can get stuck. They cannot grasp that

'X is wrong' isn't necessarily inconsistant with an exteme hypothetical where it is right to do an instance of X.

Does TS mean Thread Starter? I'm guessing that's it.

Anyway, I wasn't sure how to respond to your post, and I don't really have a problem with any of it. But in case it adds clarity I'll just say I wasn't attempting to answer the question as you have it there. I was just trying to give something like a functionalist sociological explanation of why people draw distinctions between you stealing from the guy and, for example, taxation.

I do have some doubts about the utility of traditional philosophical approaches to meta-ethics and moral questions, but that would require an even larger wall of text and it's all kind of half baked so it's probably not worth it to make anyone read it. :P

ya deconstructing the 'truth' as not, in fact, a truth, does not mean their point is not accurate or correct. It just means it has to be established on its individual merits (make the case) instead of proclaiming it to be because it is a 'truth'.

Haha yes. TS = thread starter (not he is not to be named, lol) and as we were just discussing in another thread it is more common here to use OP for 'original poster' which on other forums I have posted on stood for 'original post' which just meant 'reply to the content in the original post (OP) and not necessarily any thing that followed that'.

I will try to use OP here instead of TS due to confusion.

And yes this topic could go forever if we delved deep into those 'ethics' questions.

I don't see how you can answer this without knowing the motivation of the thief. If you are engaging in Robinhood behavior -- that is, stealing from the rich to give to the poor -- then it isn't too hard to construct a moral defense for your behavior. If you steal $5000 from your neighbor's house because you want to get a hummer in the strip club and then blow the rest at the craps table, that's a lot harder to defend, even if your neighbor has quite a bit more money than you.

And some types of theft, for example, identity theft, are so irritating and so disruptive that I can't imagine ever having sympathy for the perpetrator.