In a comment on the post about the various versions of the Golden Rule, including popular distortions of it, Isaac revisited the ever-popular “Les Misérables” scenario, in which a desperate man steals a loaf of bread to achieve a greater good. Is such law-breaking still unethical? I have consistently maintained that it is from society’s standpoint, if not from the perspective of the lawbreaker. The issue has arisen in the past in relation to illegal immigration.I think Isaac nails it.
Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, The Golden Rule Distortions:
Thank you for bringing up the “stealing a loaf of bread to feed one’s family” example.
Hypotheticals such as that are often used to enforce the idea of moral relativism. The argument is that stealing is not always “wrong” and therefore there are no absolute moral statements to be made, such as “stealing is wrong.” I find that reasoning not only flawed but nonsensical, because it presupposes that a person forced to do a wrong in order to prevent a greater wrong, did no wrong. This is bad logic. If I have no other choice but to steal in order to save an innocent life, and I DO steal, then I have done wrong. My conscience is clear, and I am not to be blamed or condemned, at least not from a moral/ethical standpoint. But the act of stealing does not lose its wrongness simply because I was forced into it by circumstances. Simply put, if I steal a loaf of bread to save my family, then I was forced to do something wrong. Assuming that I had no better alternative, I chose to do wrong because to NOT act would be to commit a greater wrong (allowing my family to die when it was in my power to save them.) This is a terrible catch-22 in which to find oneself, but it doesn’t erase the immorality of the act of stealing. It does, however, mean that I am not an immoral person for stealing. That’s all it means. I am still legally a thief, and will be punished, absent a sympathetic judge/victim.
An ethical person (again, assuming that stealing was the only alternative to a dead family) does not discount the wrongness of stealing the bread. He or she would feel bad about stealing the bread, do everything within reason to apologize or even make restitution for the crime afterward, and willingly accept the reasonable legal penalty for the crime of stealing bread without complaint.
An unethical person would say “Nananana, stick it to the man, I stole and it wasn’t wrong because I needed it, therefore stealing isn’t always wrong, it’s in the eye of the beholder” because that person is stupid.
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Ethics Alarms 
Well Done Isaac. I enjoy reading your comments.
Same to you!
“Do unto others, then split?” Unfortunately, witnessing the LA riots on tv and having supposedly good people go into stores and pick up big screens and other things their families “needed” leaves me a little cynical about stealing loaves of bread because of desperation. They could always go to the local bakery and probably get some day old bread. A thief is a thief and ought to realize it.
I don’t think those thieves are comparable. The “bread thief” has decided to balance the wrong act of stealing as less wrong than the wrong act of sitting by while his/her family starves.
The looters have decide to balance the wrong act of stealing against a neither right nor wrong act of allowing themselves or their families to go without non-life sustaining material comfort. Much like the pro-abortion crowd elevates a non-value above an actual value when deciding to rationalize their behavior/attitude, the looters are utterly unjustfiable thieves: their family does not NEED the TV or whatever was looted to stave of dying for one more day.
If anything, the “bread thief” creates a scenario very rare *if* other ethical options are available. It does not create a category in which miscreants can place themselves to ennoble their conduct and rationalize away thievery for non-necessities in non-dire situations.
Thank you Tex, I agree entirely with your well-stated 1:07 pm points. And yet, the malicious, cruel and deceptive exploitation of the scenario of the bread thief, in the “created category” you describe, is EXACTLY what we are witnessing in many of the power struggles of our modern times.
Hmmm — I don’t think I know a single person who is “pro-abortion.”
Boy, you don’t read and listen to the same feminists I do. Many NARAL leaders, for example, are aggressively pro abortion, as is the feminist wing that likens pregnancy to slavery, invasion by parasites and worse. Abortion to many activists represents a triumph over the tyranny of nature. Pro choice is an intentionally dishonest euphemism to pretend the other side of the equation doesn’t exist, as is “pro life,’ which ignores the woman’s dilemma, also intentionally.
A statement like that is akin to: “All liberals are like Keith Olbermann” or “All conservatives are like Glenn Beck.” Most of the rational, real feminists (a/k/a people who are not on TV or radio) agree that abortion is awful, but the consequences of living in a society that does not permit abortion are even more awful. Thus, we have to reluctantly side with the pro-choice side of the equation and work toward a future where abortion only is a solution in the most extreme circumstances (rape, incest, serious medical condition of the mother and/or fetus), but most individuals will be educated and responsible enough that abortion doesn’t even need to be considered.
That’s a very moderate position, the Bill Clinton position. If a fetus is just a bunch of dangerous but unhuman, unliving, rights-free cells, indistinguishable from a cancer or wart, why should removing them cause any fuss at all? Why care if there are a million abortions a year or hundreds of millions? No harm at all!
Again — have you met any actual feminists (not on TV) who really think that way in 2013?
No, because almost all of the feminists I know are mothers, married, or old, and the young women I know don’t talk about that stuff with me.
Jack — reread your last statement. Feminists do not have to be single, childless, or young. I am married, have 2 children, and am still on the youngish side. Most of my feminist friends also fall into two or more of these categories.
I look at this the same way I do other Constitutional rights. Take wire-tapping. Assuming the government has a copy of everything I do online, bully for them. What they can do with all my grocery lists and kids photos is not going to land me in prison. But, I still adamantly oppose this practice because it is wrong and unconstitutional and does have the ability to land people unjustly in prison.
Along the same lines, even though my husband and I wanted to have children — and never get an abortion — that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to live in a country where it is prohibited. Laws affect the society as a whole not to mention my children, and perhaps future grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
That sentence doesn’t say otherwise, Beth.
But it’s weird that you mention it at all — it’s not relevant. It would be like me saying, “Well, Jack doesn’t talk about sports ethics anymore because he hasn’t played for the Red Sox since ’78.” It just doesn’t make sense. The only reading I can take from your statement is that feminists who are “mothers, married, or old” are not invested in the abortion debate.
I use “pro-abortion” when I should say “pro-legal-abortion” (which doesn’t flow), because the self styled “pro-choice” label is deceptive and propagandistic. Conversely I use “anti-abortion” when I should say “anti-legal-abortion”.
I think those two labels keep the discussion honest.
Or, we can call it “pro-mother” or “anti-mother” — or “pro-fetus” or “anti-fetus.” This is too complex of a discussion to reduce it to so few words.
Right: So I stick with labels based on the ultimate goal:
the crowd that argues for legalizing abortion I call “pro-abortion” and the crowd that argues for banning abortion I call “anti-abortion”.
Other labels, such as those listed are propagandistic and appeals to emotion. The label best fits that which describes the objective. The other labels are merely a generalization of single components of the bigger argument.
OK. But then maybe we should call it “pro-legalized-abortion” per your earlier statement to make it more accurate.
Aww, c’mon, you two – break those old molds:
Be pro-illegal-life.
To withold the bread from needy people is the initial crime in some accounts. It would depend on which set of moral prior asssumptions are applied, by contract or by right or arguing from nature. Also it would depend on what understanding the owner and expropriator had of the situation. What is moral and what can be permanently known of such things? The question is eternal not closed, but can be closed by agreement? Possibly?
Well in my Christian ethics, it is immoral for me to withhold bread, if it is within my power to give some to a starving person. It would also be immoral to prosecute a person whom I know stole bread from me because he had no other choice. So if it was my hypothetical Dickensian-era bakery being robbed, obviously I would let that slide.
But it’s different from a legal perspective, since laws are not there to make everyone moral. They exist to minimize chaos and harm. The government cannot make it criminal for me not to be nice.
You may be assuming that the law givng process iis commonly acceepted to be just or at least legitimate? Imagine living in say the UK in 1917. The poorest had no vote and no ration. Result – bread riots. Fast forward to 1939 -1950 IIRC. The poor have votes at least in suspended form during hostilities,,and rationing and low prices – and no bread riots. I don’t recall what severity the 1917 rioters were dealt with. But that’s real life – not ethics. I hope that helped.
oops, i got my history wrong there. UK gov’t avoided food riots, forcing ‘nice’ ratioming in 1918 after malnutrition in 1917. Starting with sugar. The pronciple stamds though. Governments can and do compel niceness. Whether they get away with it – may be a matter of ethical perceptions…
Also, bread wasn’t rationed in Britain during the Second World War, though that came in during post-war austerity.
Quite right. I’d forgotten that. Thanks for the correction.
Isaac, excellent COD; in your 3:43 pm comment, I was with you until your last two sentences. A government can make anything it wants into criminality, as well as make laws specifically calculated to inflict the lawmakers’ (or their supporters’) desired amounts of chaos and harm on certain targets. We are seeing such laws in effect today, this hour, along with their intended and unintended consequences.
If, by what you said, you meant that government SHOULD not make it criminal for you not to be nice, I am agreeable with that, if for no other reason than a selfish one: It is so, so easy for me not to be nice. Rob my bakery once of one loaf while in the dark of a total solar eclipse because that loaf will keep someone from starving, and I’ll probably let it slide. But signal to me in advance that many someones are gearing-up to come to my bakery to loot as they please at the time of their choosing, and I’ll do what I can to make sure the looters walk out with poisoned bread – I don’t care how many of them or their ostensible beneficiaries might be starving.
to bring this back on track: if the baker breaks the golden rule by not selling/giving the bread to the needy is the expropriator still bound by that rule? Stealing is unethical. But societies have may have wide and variable definitions of what’s mne and what’s yours prior to the action commencing. In communes the harvest may be gathered in common stored in common, ground and baked by specalists. A member of such a commune would look on a baker hoarding bread much as we might look on a man putting up a pallisade in 10sq ft of Central Park and claiming it is ‘his’ – ie mad.
In that communal paradise, who decides when a baker’s actions to control access to what he produces constitute hoarding, versus rationing? I am reminded of the Little Red Hen scenario, and all her merry barnyard “friends.” That kind of “friendship,” I submit, is the more likely and common outgrowth of the communal social contract – as is “justifiable” bread-thievery. Communes proliferate their own peculiar madness. You’re not going to fool me; I’m one of those (now older, wiser) hippies.
to answer directly, if the baker feels remorse or shame in hoarding bread that would be an inidicator that a prior agreement to share had been accepted. This is the same standard as was applied to the bread thief.
I don’t advocate communes, just pointing out that a spectrum of social contracts and ways of working exist. Each system may be internally consistent. Communes being one extreme, laissez faire capitalism being possibly the other.
I guess that would be called moral relativism. But i’ve never been called a hippie before. I’m not trying to fool anyone. For what it’s worth i don’t think communes often work either. But they are a nominallly valid ethical system so shouldn’t necessarily be discounted. Nor should any shade of social concern or welfare state or any other internally consistent option.
What’s right or wrong depends on the prior agreement. That’s my puzzle with this.
Bbear, my “You’re not going to fool me” was not intended to accuse you. I only meant to assert how my experience of communal living persuaded me to reject living that way.
I would not assume that a bread thief is even aware of any agreement related to his opportunity to take bread. A baker’s feelings or actions may be connected to his understanding of some prior agreement concerning his product; maybe not.
If I was the baker, and if I judged that a “theft” was only one loaf out of abundance, I hope I would react initially with a merciful attitude toward the “thief.” I would be simultaneously suspicious of the taker’s ignorance and intentions – which could lead to changing my attitude about, and to affecting my further reaction to, the theft and thief. But, if I judged that the taking exacerbated scarcity, such that the taking of even just one loaf immediately harmed me (or others besides the thief) to an intolerable extent, my initial attitude and reaction probably would be less charitable and likely less measured. If all that means I, the baker, am practicing moral relativism, then so be it.
I think our puzzle is whether what is right and wrong (and even, what is theft) stems from some agreement, or vice-versa.
The only way I can see for rght and wrong to be prior to an agreement to live in the same town as it were and unconnected to the way of life of that town would be if right and wrong were from a higher spiritual authority. As an atheist I find that idea disturbing. If there’s any ethical principle around here that’s bigger than me and beyond my control I want to know about it – so I can kill it.
Nyaaa-nyaaa: My puzzle is more disturbing than yours. (/facetiousness)
Jack: Correction of attribution needed. You say “Luke” in your introduction of the COD, but the comment is by Isaac.
Or is this a case of one commenter who uses two different names?
No, it’s a case of me jumping Testaments. The version of The Golden Rule we use comes from Luke’s Gospel, and I must have had Luke on the brain.
I apologize, Isaac.
We actually have two questions here…1) was the stealing of the bread ethical? No, it was not. Other avenues were available to Jean Valjean. 2) Was the penalty assessed for the stealing of the bread ethical? No. A relatively minor, almost misdemeanor crime did not warrant years as a galley slave. So who was right, who was wrong…not for me to say, conclusively, but I would say, gee, everybody.
An even more interesting case study in the ethics of lawbreaking is the Underground Railroad. The Fugitive Slave Act was the settled law of the land, and the people who broke it did not stand up and say “I will accept the penalty rather than obey this law”, so it was not really civil disobedience. Nor could they plead necessity the way the starving bread thief might.
They were instead in the “But it’s a bad law” school of thought, and much as I agree with them, our host has made a persuasive case for obeying laws until they can be overturned.
It was never “settled law,” though. Settled laws don’t cause civil wars and get overturned by amendments in little more than a decade.
OK.
More precisely, then, it was properly enacted and not reversed by the US Supreme Court. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court tried to throw it out and got slapped down.
When is it ethical to flout a controversial law? The Underground Railroad would doubtless have said they were following a higher law. That way lies chaos: there are many competing “higher laws” in the world of religion.
I do find your arguments about following laws to be persuasive. Is the Underground Railroad an exception? Does it make an ethical difference that they were not motivated by self-interest?
The Underground Railroad is the domestic equivalent of the Germans who hid Jews under Hitler. As was argued in the final phase of the Nuremberg Trials, there are laws that are inherently unlawful, crimes by the state, and in such cases the moral, ethical–and,after the fact, legal thing to do for judges, law enforcement officials and citizens is to defy the law. But this is a little like the supposed duty of a soldier to defy an illegal order. You’d better be correct, or, to be more practical and cynical, you better win your argument. Pots smokers argue that the drug laws are as illegitimate as the pro-slavery laws. Anti-abortion advocates fervently believe that abortion is state sanctioned murder of innocents. If they are judged right in the eyes of history and bioethics, then it was ethical to defy those laws. If not, they were the ones in the wrong. If history had taken a different turn, if “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Abe Lincoln and other fortunate turns of history hadn’t occurred and blacks were permanently regarded in this culture as less than human and fit only to be property, the Underground Railroad might be officially regarded as a radical, criminal enterprise. Is there a place in the multiverse where the 21st Century US still permits slavery?
The issue reaches the ethics vanishing point.
What is “settled law” then?
Brown v. Board of Education is settled law. Settled law is law that is no longer seriously debated or a matter of controversy. Settled law is law that has been embedded in the culture, and is virtually universally accepted. There is no chance that the Supreme Court will overturn “settled law,” or that it will be appealed by Congress. Laws that were never or are not yet “settled”—The Fugitive Slave Act; Prohibition; Roe v. Wade; gay marriage; Obamacare.
So…not Obama Care (or Obama anything) as the administration seems to want us to believe then. Just being an unethical smart a–. But, It seems, settled law means whatever the person citing it wants it to mean.
Yesterday on Facebook I posted this comment in regards to an incident I triggered last month at the school where I substitute teach – “I think I’ve learned my lesson… sometimes you gotta be bad in order to do good.”
Ethical? I dunno. I would guess not, but, honestly, I’m just not that savvy, and so I tend to operate on instinct much of the time.
I’m still going to post on it, FM—just trying to catch up. Thanks for the nudge..its in the queue!
I await with bated/baited breath, Jack. I know you won’t hold back… that’s what friends are for.