“It’s bad to steal” isn’t a very controversial moral judgment. However, since it’s one that many religious people claim to make precisely because their god(s) told them that they ought to, it seemed like a good choice for our weekly secular morality discussion.
As an earlier comment thread demonstrated, rights are pretty slippery concepts. Are they things which humans are somehow inherently imbued with, making them inviolable? It would seem not, if you don’t subscribe to supernatural ideas about humanity’s origins. Are they things which are put in place only out of social expediency, making them totally subjective? That seems callous and a bit naive, as there are some forms of respect we do generally agree that all people deserve regardless of what country or society they live in. I’m not sure at this point how I would split the difference, but I take comfort in the fact that centuries of political philosophy hasn’t exactly sorted this problem out either.
I suppose my current thinking is that there are some rules of conduct and treatment that, virtually any time they are applied to a society, result in increased well-being overall — and these are the things worth calling “human rights.” By way of example: a right to bodily integrity is almost definitely one of these things. Any person would be harmed if they were actually, well, physically harmed … and we would live in constant fear of violence in a society where no one felt an obligation not to injure one another. Just about everyone in society (except, perhaps, for the biggest, meanest bullies) is probably going to be better off if it respects this right, whether it does so through a law or a social norm or a combination of the two.
I’m of the opinion that property rights ought to be viewed in a similar way. There are some physical objects — food, shelter, clothing, etc. — that each of us requires in order to survive. You could compare theft of these things, then, to a direct assault on a person’s life. Less drastically, however, it’s clear that everyone in our society gets personal utility out of being able to count on access to certain objects, some essential and some not so much. Each of us is happier knowing that we get to keep that stuff, and in order to preserve that happiness we have to agree collectively not to try to take other people’s stuff and to enforce that norm on each other.
I also think there is real weight to the idea that people deserve things according to the actions they took, the effort they expended, etc. This is a philosophy I’d apply to criminal punishment (sentences should reflect the badness of people’s intentional acts, not the random circumstances that may have made those acts particularly harmful or harmless in any one instance) but it also obviously has some bearing on the idea of property, too. If I put in my time and effort to build something, I deserve to have it more than you do — and it would be unfair for you to swoop in and take it from me (steal it) once I was finished. Not all the work we do results directly in tangible objects for us to use, but most of us don’t actually operate in a barter economy anyway. There’s no meaningful change in this argument if you apply it to money instead. Money is just a point system we use for converting our effort into stuff. If you work to earn your money, you deserve the stuff you bought with it. It would be unfair for someone to steal that stuff from you, or for someone to steal your money before you spent it on anything. (And even if you didn’t earn your money — say, you inherited it — that certainly doesn’t mean that some Joe Shmoe deserves it more and that he would be justified in stealing it from you.)
These two reasons are why, broadly speaking, I think it is morally wrong to steal. I admit that there are some special cases where I think it is less wrong, or at least more forgivable, to steal. Stealing an item of fancy jewelry from a very rich person is less wrong than stealing food from a person on the brink of starvation. Stealing something because you need it desperately to survive is less wrong than stealing something for personal profit or thrills. I can also imagine functioning societies where collective ownership of property is the norm and “stealing” isn’t even a concept that makes sense. (I suppose in that case you could argue that “don’t steal” is still a rule, but it means “don’t appropriate for your own what we have agreed to share amongst us all.”) Nevertheless, in any real human society I’ve ever experienced, a recognized rule against stealing is a valuable one, and one which I am happy to follow. The obvious gains we experience in overall fairness and social welfare are enough for me to recognize a “right” to property.
Jojo the hun on 
seiyakino
/ June 19, 2011 at 6:26 pm…”(And even if you didn’t earn your money — say, you inherited it — that certainly doesn’t mean that some Joe Shmoe deserves it more and that he would be justified in stealing it from you.)”…
So how do you feel about taxation? Is that theft?
I think that’s where I part ways with your argument a bit; that’s the standard libertarian line right there, and it’s used to justify some of the most disgusting inequalities in the world. I would argue that someone else in desperate need doesn’t deserve those resources any /less/, either, if the other person is receiving those resources for nothing more than getting born. It builds a more functional society to have each person get at least enough food to develop and thrive, shelter to survive and make it to work another day, and a bare minimum of comfort and hope to make it worth waking up in the morning. That’s what each person just by being born ‘deserves’, and birth should not be enough to say ‘you get resources far in excess of all of those when someone has the ‘right’ to starve’. If they’ve done the work to have those resources, great! Let them be as lavish as they want. But that line in your argument justifies idle heirs like Paris Hilton being able to express fly a single pizza to NY from California just because they like some Cali pizza shop, while a child in some underfunded inner-city public school didn’t get a good enough lunch to concentrate on the test that determines whether they make it to the next grade.
Keith Harrison
/ June 20, 2011 at 5:39 pmNFQ, I think you make a good, clear defense of property rights.
To me, the problem which seiyakino brings up is more of a practical one regarding the real-life reconciliation of your two premises, namely:
1) people have a right to that property which allows them to survive and
2) people have a right to whatever earnings their efforts deserve
The two premises are reconcilable as long as there is plenty of wealth to go around. But when it’s closer to a zero sum game, and if we start out with gross inequalities in income across the population, then the two premises will constantly be left unfulfilled. The question, then, is how to transfer wealth in such as way as to fulfill the two premises for every individual. It may not even be possible.
Another potentially thorny issue is deciding exactly what a deserving amount of wealth is for a particular effort. What, exactly, is a deserving salary for a plumber? A teacher?
NFQ
/ June 21, 2011 at 10:24 pm@seiyakino:
Thanks for raising this point. I feel fine about taxation. I don’t think that it is stealing. I am definitely not a libertarian.
I don’t see government as a distinct entity “stealing” money from people via taxes, but rather as the embodiment of the collective will of the people acting in our aggregate interest. If you don’t want to pay taxes, there are places you can move to. You don’t have to have the support of a functioning police force and fire department, you don’t have to have education and medical treatment available, you don’t have to have a military ready to defend you against invading forces. But if you want to live in a comfortable place, with some programs and services administered by the government in order to make our lives better than they would be if we all fended for ourselves in the wild, we’ll need to raise funds to do that somehow. It makes the most sense for everyone to chip in according to what they can afford. Decreasing marginal utility of money means that rich people can afford to give more (i.e., progressive taxation).
I don’t think that having elected representatives deliberate over and then vote on complex tax policy is morally the same as some dude taking it upon himself to relieve you of your hard-earned cash. I agonized over the wording of that exact sentence you quoted for this very reason — I decided I could write another thousand words in the original post, or we could just take it up in the comment section if anyone was interested.
@Keith:
Very thorny issue indeed! Normally I would say that anyone should get paid what people are willing to pay for their goods and services — that’s sort of the economic definition of the value of their work. It’s not too hard for a plumber to make that happen. They bill their customers for the work they do. Who is the “customer” of a teacher, though? Their students? Their students’ parents? Society in general? It’s not always so straightforward, and having public school teachers’ salaries negotiated by school boards and teachers unions doesn’t always help clarify the important stuff, to say the least.
Maybe this means that it’s more forgivable / less morally objectionable to steal from people who earn more than they really deserve. I guess that’s true … the legendary Robin Hood is a hero figure. But considering the importance of preserving the norm that we all obey the laws, and the extremely high bar for certainty that we’d need before deeming someone’s salary too high, I don’t think I’d ever find myself in a position where I’d justify stealing on these grounds.
Jojo the hun
/ June 22, 2011 at 12:02 amWow, where’s that famous atheistic skepticism? All you’re doing, in this whole series, is cobbling together a few simple, vague ideas to loosely rationalize why we have a few of the aspects of the conventional morality particular to our own time and place. I could see you justifying any number of behaviors we currently call “bad” in a similar way.
This line is particularly priceless: that government is “the embodiment of the collective will of the people acting in our aggregate interest”! From uber skepticism to uber naivete. Where does a thought like that come from? Governments themselves don’t portray themselves in that way. Sounds an awful lot like something you’d hear in a church.
Nothing in your posts or comments even addresses the simple question: why should an individual not steal everything he can, if he can get away with it?
NFQ
/ June 22, 2011 at 1:10 am@Jojo:
Like what? I’m curious what you’re thinking of. It’s quite possible that I would approve of some behavior you currently call bad, but I’d like to think I’d only do so if it could be logically argued that the behavior and my approval of it has net positive, or at least net neutral, effects.
I didn’t mean to say that the government acts in the people’s interest 100% of the time. You’re right to call me out on naivete there; it did sound naive. Libertarians often talk about the government as though it is some alien creature hell-bent on destroying life as we know it, so I meant to clarify that I see the ideal government as something that people have created to do what is best for those people themselves (see: social contract theory). We’re constantly working toward that ideal government, but we’re definitely not there yet in any country I know of. Most modern liberal democracies come pretty close, though, in the context of human history and compared to other forms of government we’ve tried.
It seems to me that you haven’t read my original post, then. You shouldn’t steal everything you can because we all — yourself included — benefit from perpetuating the norm that we should respect the property claims of others. In simple language: if you don’t want people to steal from you, you shouldn’t steal from other people. It’s not in your interest to make stealing seem “okay.” I also discussed some ideas about moral desert in my original post, arguing that people have a fair claim to the things/value they worked to create.
Jojo the hun
/ June 22, 2011 at 11:43 pmAny actions involving taking something valuable from one person or group of people and distributing them to others. A poor person being enslaved. You could argue that the person’s life is only marginally worse, or even better, but the life of those he serves is much improved. Killing an old rich person and distributing his money to worthwhile causes. Killing old sick people, whose expected future care costs vastly outweigh their expected value added to the group. The only argument I see you’ve made against these violations of life and liberty is that there would be a cost in terms of fear among everyone that they would be so victimized. If you could show that there wouldn’t be much fear, and that in the aggregate the population is better off, then you’d be showing that these heinous acts were moral, per your system. Am I missing something?
Re the last point, NFQ: you and I can agree that if people don’t steal we’ll all be better off. What you’re not providing is a reason why a person should feel any moral compunction about stealing.
For example, a person might not agree that if people don’t steal we’ll all be better off; if so, he won’t feel morally bound not to steal, per your system.
Even if the person does agree with the statement, he simply may not care that collectively the group is better off if that rule is followed. Again, he won’t feel morally bound not to steal.
And, even if the person does agree with the statement, and does also care whether we all, collectively, are better off, he may reason that if he does steal ( and does not get caught) his personal gain will be much greater than his personal loss, measured as a small loss of trust in his community, and that this tilts the scales away from being morally bound to not steal.
See the prisoner’s dilemma in game theory, the free rider problem in economics, and the is-ought problem in philosophy for some insights.
NFQ
/ June 23, 2011 at 10:11 amAll right, Jojo, I think I see where you and I have parted ways.
1. I am not trying to derive an absolute, objective set of moral rules. I am trying to show how a person can be completely capable of reasoning through moral questions without the guidance of a supernatural being or a sacred text.
2. You seem to be expecting me to show why everyone should personally feel compelled to be moral. I don’t think that’s my burden at all. You are making objections like, “All you show is that bad actions make everyone worse off. Why should anyone care about that?” Because that’s bad, Jojo. Some people are assholes, and that’s really unfortunate. But this is a really nonunique problem — you might as well say to a theologian or a pastor, “All you show is that bad actions make God unhappy. Why should anyone care about that?” It’s really beside the point of discussing what moral behavior looks like.
3. You wrote, “If you could show that there wouldn’t be much fear, and that in the aggregate the population is better off, then you’d be showing that these heinous acts were moral, per your system.” But … wouldn’t they not be “heinous” anymore, at that point? If it turned out that people were reassured by the prospect of, say, having a painless death guaranteed at age 50, instead of terrified by the imposition, and this resulted in lots more resources for everyone else … you’re right, I wouldn’t see a problem with a Logan’s Run-type society. But then, I make my decisions based on evidence and I am willing to change my opinion in light of new information. I don’t simply call some things “heinous” a priori and form my beliefs around all those assumptions.