Relationship between crime and ethics

[Borachio]

Well, that's not my position at all. The question was whether the starving thief commits an action that is immoral.

I'd say the starving person should approach the person in possession of bread and ask - not steal. If bread is refused - which might be for all sorts of reasons - then the death of the starving person is the responsibility of the person refusing, who could well be guilty of murder as a result.

At least, that's my rather simplistic reading of the ethics of the situation.

I think it's sound. And I think it is consistent with pacifism too. But that's another issue.

 

[Traitorfish]

Yes.

Right, well, that's messed up, but at least we know where you stand.

This isn't a realistic situation, however. There are ALWAYS other options.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines

 

[Borachio]

Right. Let's get down to business.

Let's assume that the starving thief is justified. What if he steals food from someone and by doing so causes them to die?

Or is he only justified to the amount of food he requires, whether or not this results in the death of another?

Do you see what a tangled web this will lead to?

In the end, what's to tell the thief that his existence is more valuable than the person he steals from.

You could, of course, justify the thief by saying he will only steal from some infinite supply of food, thus not affecting anyone else at all. But this is a scarcely credible circumstance, is it?

 

[GhostWriter16]

Well, that's not my position at all. The question was whether the starving thief commits an action that is immoral.

I'd say the starving person should approach the person in possession of bread and ask - not steal. If bread is refused - which might be for all sorts of reasons - then the death of the starving person is the responsibility of the person refusing, who could well be guilty of murder as a result.

At least, that's my rather simplistic reading of the ethics of the situation.

I think it's sound. And I think it is consistent with pacifism too. But that's another issue.

If someone is asked for bread, has plenty of resources, and refuses, he should be shunned by the community, which may result in what is virtually equivalent to exile, but he should not be legally charged with a crime.

Right, well, that's messed up, but at least we know where you stand.

Assuming a case where there is plenty of food, I can't really imagine this happening, and in a case wihere there is not a lot of food...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines

Bad things are going to happen, however, to force everyone to share food will make the problem even worse, and make even more people die because less food will actually be produced.

This doesn't really apply to you, TF, but what amazes me is that so many people who would find my position against theft to be repulsive yet would continue to justify property ownership when people actually are starving in Africa.

 

[Traitorfish]

Bad things are going to happen, however, to force everyone to share food will make the problem even worse, and make even more people die because less food will actually be produced.

Great Irish Famine, 1845-51. Ireland produced more than enough food to feed itself and then some for the entire duration. Yet, over a million died of starvation, with a further two million fleeing the country as refugees. Why? Because the Irish peasants did not own the land they worked, and fed themselves largely on the feeble allotments attached to their cottages, while the landlords sold the bulk of their product to the more profitable markets of industrial England. Many peasants at this time were forced out of their cottages by landlords seeking more profitable tenants, depriving them of even the unenviable sustenance of a half acre of rotten potatoes. If the peasantry had access to the product of this land, to the bountiful non-potato crops, there would have been no famine.

But, we are told, sharing the food would have caused even greater starvation. Somehow, inexplicably. It was for the best that one million died, and two million more were driven to exile, because the infringement of the sanctity of property could only have unleashed yet greater destruction. So that's all right then.

 

[Borachio]

If someone is asked for bread, has plenty of resources, and refuses, he should be shunned by the community, which may result in what is virtually equivalent to exile, but he should not be legally charged with a crime.

But this is a case of criminal negligence. If a doctor willfully refused to aid a patient he'd be struck off.

Why do you have such a weak notion of the Social Contract?

Have you had a deprived childhood or something?

 

[Flying Pig]

GW - You seem to be presenting it as a dichotomy - either we argue that property rights are absolute, or that they are non-existant. This isn't the case.

 

[GhostWriter16]

No, I haven't had a deprived childhood, and there's no such thing as a social contract.

 

[Borachio]

I'm not so sure.

 

[GhostWriter16]

Great Irish Famine, 1845-51. Ireland produced more than enough food to feed itself and then some for the entire duration. Yet, over a million died of starvation, with a further two million fleeing the country as refugees. Why? Because the Irish peasants did not own the land they worked, and fed themselves largely on the feeble allotments attached to their cottages, while the landlords sold the bulk of their product to the more profitable markets of industrial England. Many peasants at this time were forced out of their cottages by landlords seeking more profitable tenants, depriving them of even the unenviable sustenance of a half acre of rotten potatoes. If the peasantry had access to the product of this land, to the bountiful non-potato crops, there would have been no famine.

But, we are told, sharing the food would have caused even greater starvation. Somehow, inexplicably. It was for the best that one million died, and two million more were driven to exile, because the infringement of the sanctity of property could only have unleashed yet greater destruction. So that's all right then.

While I don't know much about this particular famine, I suspect that those property titles were likely illegitimate.

Libertarian property is based first on homesteading, and then on peaceful trade. Note that only unworked land can be homesteaded, owned land cannot, so there are certain circumstances through which a peaceful contract will result in someone working on land that they nonetheless do not own, this would require the owners (Or their ancestors, or someone else who peacefull traded them the land) to have at one point worked the land. If those who worked the land were the first to have done so, then they were the rightful owners, whether the state recognized this or not.

 

[lovett]

GW - You seem to be presenting it as a dichotomy - either we argue that property rights are absolute, or that they are non-existant. This isn't the case.

He seems to be taking the "Stick your head in the sand and hope the nasty people questioning my beliefs go away" approach to this. It comes with a side-order of "Reassert your beliefs incessantly, but never justify them".

 

[Flying Pig]

While I don't know much about this particular famine, I suspect that those property titles were likely illegitimate.

Libertarian property is based first on homesteading, and then on peaceful trade. Note that only unworked land can be homesteaded, owned land cannot, so there are certain circumstances through which a peaceful contract will result in someone working on land that they nonetheless do not own, this would require the owners (Or their ancestors, or someone else who peacefull traded them the land) to have at one point worked the land. If those who worked the land were the first to have done so, then they were the rightful owners, whether the state recognized this or not.

Yes, but the point is that Lord Antrim's great-great-great-great grandfather was the first man to work the land, and his great-great-great grandfather peacefully bought land off the chap next door, and his great-great grandfather peacefully doubled the size of his farm through peaceful purchase and got some tenant farmers to work it for him, and so on - leading, through entirely peaceful and legitimate inheritance of property, to a situation where Lord Antrim owns the whole area, everybody working the land is working for him, and he owns all of the produce and can sell it wherever it makes him the most money. The side-effect of this, if Lord Antrim doesn't care much for his workers, is famine.

 

[GhostWriter16]

Are you sure those property rights can be legitimately traced back to homesteading?

 

[Flying Pig]

I fail to see how the situation described above is impossible if they are. The fact that they aren't always (I don't know enough about Irish history to comment, but most English aristocrats owe their positions to the goodwill of William the Conqueror) in this case is immaterial.

 

[Traitorfish]

While I don't know much about this particular famine, I suspect that those property titles were likely illegitimate.

Libertarian property is based first on homesteading, and then on peaceful trade. Note that only unworked land can be homesteaded, owned land cannot, so there are certain circumstances through which a peaceful contract will result in someone working on land that they nonetheless do not own, this would require the owners (Or their ancestors, or someone else who peacefull traded them the land) to have at one point worked the land. If those who worked the land were the first to have done so, then they were the rightful owners, whether the state recognized this or not.

That doesn't really make sense. The first people to work the land in Ireland live thousands of years ago, not in the 1840s, and by your logic their descendants had in the absence of a formal bequeathment no more right to it than the gentry. Further, farming in the 1840s wasn't just a matter of dragging sticks through the dirt, it involved a serious (if compared to industry relatively modest) investment of capital, which was supplied by the landlord-employer, not the peasant, so even if we concede that the land rightfully belonged to the peasants, it is not obvious (within the terms of your logic) that all of the product of that land belonged to them.

Further, even if it's true enough that the landowning class held their property illegitimately- which I wouldn't contest- couldn't you say that about virtually everywhere? Even the supposedly ideal example of homesteading, the American West, involved the large-scale appropriation of land occupied by Indian peoples. Only place in the world I can think of in which land hasn't at some point been appropriated from one set of people by another is Iceland (which had no inhabitants before the relatively egalitarian Norse settlers of the 9th century), and I'm not even sure about that.

What this seems to amount to is not the claim that in this instance a libertarian theory of property would permit the expropriation of foodstuffs, but the realisation that in no instance does a libertarian theory of property tells us anything about the real world.

I'm not so sure.

Wikipedia has a page on Odin, too. Doesn't mean he exists.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

there's no such thing as a social contract.

Then go live in the mountains where none of these unfortunate Robinson Crusoes can infringe upon your whatever-the-hell-you're-worried-about, and leave the civilized to be sensible and soldier forward together. I hope you have knowledge of medicine, farming, construction, and weaving, and never encounter another human so long as you live, so that you can fulfill your maximum personal potential free of the interference of us lesser encroachers and our silly ideas about interpersonal relationships and socialization.

 

[Flying Pig]

Wikipedia has a page on Odin, too. Doesn't mean he exists.

A social contract isn't really a Thing; it's an interpretation: whether it exists is immaterial to how things are, but it does provide something of a lens when considering how things should be. In effect, we say 'if government was a contract signed between the people and the State, then it should be run like this', and decide that since such a contract is a good starting-point for legitimate authority, then it makes sense to run it in that way.

 

[Borachio]

Wikipedia has a page on Odin, too. Doesn't mean he exists.

Well, true. But it doesn't mean he doesn't either.

"There's no such thing as society" cooed Thatcher. But the great British public, in one of their fleeting moments of sanity, decided she was wrong.

 

[HannibalBarka]

America wastes all its resoures killing people

In all seriousness, I don't really know what kind of hard figures to look for but I know that obviously the less you profit from producing, the less you will produce. It may be that the countries you mentioned are doing better than America IN SPITE of this, but I don't think they are doing better BECAUSE of this.

I think that this is too simplistic. Thinking that "material profit" is the only driver that makes people produce is a 19th century reasoning it's definetly not a 2.0 one. We now know that people have many more motives than just "greed" to makes them "produce" more. Two easy additinnal motives are the pure pleasure of feeling useful and/or helpful. As a christian and a wiki addict I am surprised you didn't think of that.

The other less obvious reason is that a socio dem hole gives more chance to make everyone more productive by increasing the chances of getting everyone to have the best education they can no matter how poor they are. And that is what Denmark, Germany, Finland and co are achieving better than capitalist and everyone on its own countries.

If I have two kids, than I am sure the one I'll help by financing his studies will have a better chance on producing more than the one I'll let on his own

 

[Flying Pig]

"There's no such thing as society" cooed Thatcher. But the great British public, in one of their fleeting moments of sanity, decided she was wrong.

Thatcher did go on to say 'there are only individuals and their families', and in many cases she's right - if it's not in the interests of the people who make up society, it's not in the 'good of society'. Her point was that 'the greater good' is often at best illusory and at worst dangerous; I'm actually inclined to agree.