15. Starving poor child: Ethical to steal & feed hungry kid?
If you have no other option as a means to acquire food in the short term, is it morally wrong to steal in order to feed your starving children? Answered by Dennis Pratt
{Temperance to this strong answer, given feedback from Quorans, are at the bottom.)
The Simple Answer on Ethics
When you steal, you are partially enslaving another human being; you are taking the output of his labor without his consent. It is as though you retroactively forced him to work for you during the time that he labored to produce what you stole.
Now, it might be “understandable” why you did it, but yes, what you are doing is evil. If you do it “because you must”, you must return to him later that which you stole, plus generous interest, in order to compensate him for his labor, its time value, and the fact that you violated him as a free human being.
Violence?
But let’s go one step further. Does a victim have the right to violently stop someone stealing from them? And if the victim threatens violence on the thief, may the thief defend himself also with violence?
You go to a hen house to steal a chicken for your starving child. The owner doesn’t know who who are or what you are stealing and brings his shotgun. You want to return to your child for otherwise he’ll not only be starving, he’ll be parentless. Are you now justifying killing the owner? Where does your justification end?
Direct Slavery?
Or, let’s say that the food you need is not out of the ground yet. Can you hold a shotgun over the owner to force him to labor in the field to harvest your food for you. After all, you “need” it for your “starving child”, so isn’t a little direct slavery justified. If you wait for him to harvest it and then steal it, it may be too late for your child.
Slavery Over Time?
Ah, but what about tomorrow, or the next day. Won’t your child still need food? Think of the future hunger pangs!
Why not move in? Your child needs shelter from the rain, and the better to keep your slave providing you and your child with food … so that your child doesn’t starve.
Why Starving?
The more important question is what type of father are you that you have placed your child in this jeopardy? What type of man were you that you did not make damn sure that you could care for your child before you birthed it?
And how can you be so selfish to keep the child, whom it is now clear that you cannot care for, whom you are now starving to death? You are obviously too incompetent to safely raise the child. You are the one putting your child at risk.
And now you are going to use the result of your incompetence, selfishness, and arrogance as justification to steal the labor and product of another human being who had no guilt in your mistreatment of your child? To enslave him, and perhaps to hurt or kill him. For what reason? So you can “keep your child” whom you are too incompetent to keep safe?
You are offering this scenario like you didn’t make a whole bunch of bad decisions that directly led to your child starving. Instead of owning your role in it, you look to use it as justification for more evil.
The fault that your child is starving is yours. It is not the farmer’s whom you are enslaving or killing. She has done nothing to your child, but you have.
Take responsibility. Be a man. Be a father. Step up!
No Other Choice?
Well, you must be have some severe mental deficiencies if you can’t figure out how to exchange your labor for bit of food for your child. How about, “Excuse me, ma’am. My daughter is starving. Do you have an attic I could clean in exchange for some soup?” How is that beyond your ability to conceive?
Which brings into question why you decided the world needed your particular set of genes replicated. I mean, you’re not going to get any smarter. And your child has largely inherited your intelligence, so you condemned your child to live like this as well, and probably to, in turn, starve her child.
Sadly, the full tragedy will come when your selfishness and incompetence kills an innocent man who is good, hard-working, and competent, who is taking care of his child, a child who has much more likelihood to figure out how to trade labor for a bowl of soup.
Look, you should be focused on much bigger decisions tonight than whether to steal a bit of food.
Temperance:
{Note: I wrote this from a bias of a relatively free country, and it does not adequately handle these cases:
A tyrannical government is starving its people to death. In this case, it is still unethical to steal from fellow citizens, but it is ethical to steal from anyone associated with the government. (See Was Robin Hood a villain? ) My admonition of birthing a child only with proper safeguards for its care would not apply to such tyrannical shocks. [Your exception here… ] }
