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I've not been privileged all my life. I have a dislike for fish because of some of things and situations we were in. It is never, ever ok to steal. Stealing

I've not been privileged all my life. I have a dislike for fish because of some of things and situations we were in. 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.

vidarh 11y ago
> It is black and white 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.
- protomyth 11y ago
  > That you believe this makes it absolutely impossible for me to think you're not in a privileged position. 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?
  - vidarh 11y ago
    > Believe what you want, but I sure as hell didn't grow up in a privileged position. 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.
    - protomyth 11y ago
      > Have you ever starved? (And going hungry is not starvation). I've gone hungry and I know my Dad did. There was choices made by this person before they hit starve. They were hungry first. Why is visiting a church or other organization unacceptable to you?
      - vidarh 11y ago
        > I've gone hungry and I know my Dad did. Going hungry and starvation are two vastly different things, both physiologically and mentally. > There was choices made by this person before they hit starve. And these choices were insufficient to save him. So now what? Do you want him to starve to death because he was unable to fix things? Are property rights for a few euros worth that much to you compared to the well-being of a fellow human? > Why is visiting a church or other organization unacceptable to you? If you think that is what I said, you did not understand what I wrote.
        protomyth 11y ago
        > And these choices were insufficient to save him > If you think that is what I said, you did not understand what I wrote. I cannot think otherwise because you seem to say that stealing is still the only means of survival. I offered what this person could do instead of stealing. Stealing is still not the only solution.
        vidarh 11y ago
        > I cannot think otherwise because you seem to say that stealing is still the only means of survival. I offered what this person could do instead of stealing. Stealing is still not the only solution. My point, which you still do not seem to understand, is that someone who is starving is not in a frame of mind where you can expect them to be able to calmly and logically go through the available options, weigh them, find the most moral one, and execute on it. Hence why I asked if you have ever experienced starvation rather than just hunger. To me the above ranks with the (admittedly apocryphal) "let them eat cake". Technically, yes, he "could" have done many things.
- zo1 11y ago
  The problem with peddling guilt is that not everyone subscribes to it. I pay taxes, and I expect the needy and the poor and the sick and the hungry to be taken care of. If anyone should feel guilty, it should be the government leaders and the people that don't hold them accountable for the duties there are tasked with performing. 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.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    The supermarket owner does have that right, and likely would if asked discretely. People are generally good and would probably forgive. Many do. That's why it is so important to donate to food shelters (don't forget toys for children - feed the body and mind). But saying stealing is ok is wrong.
    - wfo 11y ago
      People are generally good. But some people aren't. Incidentally, those are the people who tend to accumulate wealth and power. There are certainly people in this world who would sit on top a mountain of food that will spoil if not eaten a foot away from a starving dying man and tell him he's not allowed to have any because they'd like to watch him suffer. In that case stealing is quite alright by me.
      - justratsinacoat 11y ago
        >There are certainly people in this world who would sit on top a mountain of food that will spoil if not eaten a foot away from a starving dying man and tell him he's not allowed to have any because they'd like to watch him suffer Hell, there are people in this thread who would apparently play the role of the foodpile guy because of their intensely, sincerely held moral conviction!
  - pka 11y ago
    So you would never steal, no matter the situation?
- wfo 11y ago
  Why are you so obsessed with his personal life? Are you hoping you can neatly fit his life experiences into a box you call 'privilege' and then dismiss everything he has to say without argument? That sort of behavior is mostly frowned upon around here.
  - eropple 11y ago
    If you think that identifying privilege is to dismiss an argument, rather than to demonstrate its limitations--well, I would suggest some reflection about what is leading you to that assumption, 'cause that's not what vidarh is doing. It's not rhetorical, but rather functional--an understanding of sociological privilege is effectively a requirement to have a meaningful conversation about any of this. That, not "oh, you're privileged so I will dismiss it", is the point of asking these questions and why they matter: to demonstrate the shades of gray and the limits of perception that are necessary to have this conversation without ending up swamped in reductive pointlessness. 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.
    - wfo 11y ago
      That assumption comes from experience, by which I mean in my experience almost every single time I have seen the word 'privilege' used it is used as a weapon to turn a discussion from a thoughtful, respectful one to hateful screaming about the personal lives of others, and to tell people that their opinion is irrelevant because their life experiences don't match the currently approved life experiences (some collection of socioeconomic disadvantage, minority ethnic background, female, LGBT). I don't really happen to meet the textbook definition of 'privilege', though I think that's pretty irrelevant here. Do you really think it's important whether this particular poster is 'privileged'? If it came out that she were actually a poor trans orphan who grew up starving and had a severe physical disability, would it change the discussion? What if he were a 22 year old tech bro with a rich dad who chugs beer and red bull and harasses women in his spare time? Are the points he made less correct now? If you think so, you should reconsider how you evaluate arguments, discussions, perhaps words themselves. Does it matter for any real purpose of the discussion other than to help you condescendingly armchair-psychoanalyze him (as you have with me) and tell him that his background is why he believes what he believes, and that he just doesn't really understand and never can? The beauty of discussions online (and there are plenty of drawbacks as well of course) is that you can express yourself, state an opinion, have a thoughtful discussion with others without people hating or dismissing you for who you are; only what you say. That's why most forums don't have a "real names policy". That's why most forums don't have a 'privilege-meter' next to usernames that uses a sophisticated algorithm to measure how many disadvantages a person has been through, spitting out a final number that tells us how seriously to take her posts. This kind of unsolicited digging into a person's personal life is generally frowned upon in any online discussion forum.
betenoire 11y ago
It's really not black and white at all. Stealing addresses the immediate present concerns. Government programs address the systematic problems and may not be able to help in time. This is somewhat like telling someone to wait til the next presidential election to vote to solve the problems they are having today. Makes sense when it's not you, but until then you have needs.
- protomyth 11y ago
  Go to a church, community center, government building, or food kitchen - there are places to go. Causing more ill in the world and pain to others is not an answer.
  - betenoire 11y ago
    There is a presumption of loss in your statement. Here's my proof by contradiction that it's not black and white: If stealing from me was the only offense (not scaring my family, or taking some security from us), I couldn't care less. There is no pain, there is no loss, it's material. I'm totally sincere in this, too.
noir_lord 11y ago
> This whole "shades of grey" leads to the blackness that destroys people and civilizations. 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).
- protomyth 11y ago
  > 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.
  - pka 11y ago
    Trying to force your morals on other people (by claiming they are absolute) makes the world a worse place.
    - protomyth 11y ago
      Society does it all the time, that's why no murder and stealing are pretty much the first laws people make. Trying not to cause pain does not make the world a worse place.
      - sheepdestroyer 11y ago
        Right to life is self evident while property's is not. "La Propriété est elle juste?" - Proudhon
      - 11y ago
kitsune_ 11y ago
Nothing man made is ever black and white. There is no universal physical law of morality. 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.
- vidarh 11y ago
  > 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? 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).

vidarh 11y ago

> It is black and white 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.

protomyth 11y ago
> That you believe this makes it absolutely impossible for me to think you're not in a privileged position. 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?
- vidarh 11y ago
  > Believe what you want, but I sure as hell didn't grow up in a privileged position. 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.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    > Have you ever starved? (And going hungry is not starvation). I've gone hungry and I know my Dad did. There was choices made by this person before they hit starve. They were hungry first. Why is visiting a church or other organization unacceptable to you?
    - vidarh 11y ago
      > I've gone hungry and I know my Dad did. Going hungry and starvation are two vastly different things, both physiologically and mentally. > There was choices made by this person before they hit starve. And these choices were insufficient to save him. So now what? Do you want him to starve to death because he was unable to fix things? Are property rights for a few euros worth that much to you compared to the well-being of a fellow human? > Why is visiting a church or other organization unacceptable to you? If you think that is what I said, you did not understand what I wrote.
      - protomyth 11y ago
        > And these choices were insufficient to save him > If you think that is what I said, you did not understand what I wrote. I cannot think otherwise because you seem to say that stealing is still the only means of survival. I offered what this person could do instead of stealing. Stealing is still not the only solution.
        vidarh 11y ago
        > I cannot think otherwise because you seem to say that stealing is still the only means of survival. I offered what this person could do instead of stealing. Stealing is still not the only solution. My point, which you still do not seem to understand, is that someone who is starving is not in a frame of mind where you can expect them to be able to calmly and logically go through the available options, weigh them, find the most moral one, and execute on it. Hence why I asked if you have ever experienced starvation rather than just hunger. To me the above ranks with the (admittedly apocryphal) "let them eat cake". Technically, yes, he "could" have done many things.
zo1 11y ago
The problem with peddling guilt is that not everyone subscribes to it. I pay taxes, and I expect the needy and the poor and the sick and the hungry to be taken care of. If anyone should feel guilty, it should be the government leaders and the people that don't hold them accountable for the duties there are tasked with performing. 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.
- protomyth 11y ago
  The supermarket owner does have that right, and likely would if asked discretely. People are generally good and would probably forgive. Many do. That's why it is so important to donate to food shelters (don't forget toys for children - feed the body and mind). But saying stealing is ok is wrong.
  - wfo 11y ago
    People are generally good. But some people aren't. Incidentally, those are the people who tend to accumulate wealth and power. There are certainly people in this world who would sit on top a mountain of food that will spoil if not eaten a foot away from a starving dying man and tell him he's not allowed to have any because they'd like to watch him suffer. In that case stealing is quite alright by me.
    - justratsinacoat 11y ago
      >There are certainly people in this world who would sit on top a mountain of food that will spoil if not eaten a foot away from a starving dying man and tell him he's not allowed to have any because they'd like to watch him suffer Hell, there are people in this thread who would apparently play the role of the foodpile guy because of their intensely, sincerely held moral conviction!
- pka 11y ago
  So you would never steal, no matter the situation?
wfo 11y ago
Why are you so obsessed with his personal life? Are you hoping you can neatly fit his life experiences into a box you call 'privilege' and then dismiss everything he has to say without argument? That sort of behavior is mostly frowned upon around here.
- eropple 11y ago
  If you think that identifying privilege is to dismiss an argument, rather than to demonstrate its limitations--well, I would suggest some reflection about what is leading you to that assumption, 'cause that's not what vidarh is doing. It's not rhetorical, but rather functional--an understanding of sociological privilege is effectively a requirement to have a meaningful conversation about any of this. That, not "oh, you're privileged so I will dismiss it", is the point of asking these questions and why they matter: to demonstrate the shades of gray and the limits of perception that are necessary to have this conversation without ending up swamped in reductive pointlessness. 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.
  - wfo 11y ago
    That assumption comes from experience, by which I mean in my experience almost every single time I have seen the word 'privilege' used it is used as a weapon to turn a discussion from a thoughtful, respectful one to hateful screaming about the personal lives of others, and to tell people that their opinion is irrelevant because their life experiences don't match the currently approved life experiences (some collection of socioeconomic disadvantage, minority ethnic background, female, LGBT). I don't really happen to meet the textbook definition of 'privilege', though I think that's pretty irrelevant here. Do you really think it's important whether this particular poster is 'privileged'? If it came out that she were actually a poor trans orphan who grew up starving and had a severe physical disability, would it change the discussion? What if he were a 22 year old tech bro with a rich dad who chugs beer and red bull and harasses women in his spare time? Are the points he made less correct now? If you think so, you should reconsider how you evaluate arguments, discussions, perhaps words themselves. Does it matter for any real purpose of the discussion other than to help you condescendingly armchair-psychoanalyze him (as you have with me) and tell him that his background is why he believes what he believes, and that he just doesn't really understand and never can? The beauty of discussions online (and there are plenty of drawbacks as well of course) is that you can express yourself, state an opinion, have a thoughtful discussion with others without people hating or dismissing you for who you are; only what you say. That's why most forums don't have a "real names policy". That's why most forums don't have a 'privilege-meter' next to usernames that uses a sophisticated algorithm to measure how many disadvantages a person has been through, spitting out a final number that tells us how seriously to take her posts. This kind of unsolicited digging into a person's personal life is generally frowned upon in any online discussion forum.

betenoire 11y ago

It's really not black and white at all. Stealing addresses the immediate present concerns. Government programs address the systematic problems and may not be able to help in time. This is somewhat like telling someone to wait til the next presidential election to vote to solve the problems they are having today. Makes sense when it's not you, but until then you have needs.

protomyth 11y ago
Go to a church, community center, government building, or food kitchen - there are places to go. Causing more ill in the world and pain to others is not an answer.
- betenoire 11y ago
  There is a presumption of loss in your statement. Here's my proof by contradiction that it's not black and white: If stealing from me was the only offense (not scaring my family, or taking some security from us), I couldn't care less. There is no pain, there is no loss, it's material. I'm totally sincere in this, too.

noir_lord 11y ago

> This whole "shades of grey" leads to the blackness that destroys people and civilizations. 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).

protomyth 11y ago
> 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.
- pka 11y ago
  Trying to force your morals on other people (by claiming they are absolute) makes the world a worse place.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    Society does it all the time, that's why no murder and stealing are pretty much the first laws people make. Trying not to cause pain does not make the world a worse place.
    - sheepdestroyer 11y ago
      Right to life is self evident while property's is not. "La Propriété est elle juste?" - Proudhon
    - 11y ago

kitsune_ 11y ago

Nothing man made is ever black and white. There is no universal physical law of morality. 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.

vidarh 11y ago
> 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? 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).