As if 80% of western philosophy was written by well off people who sometimes owned slaves.
80% of western education is administered by partisan apparatchiks fulfilling an ideological mandate for their paymasters.
Western philosophy is absolutely dripping with revolutionary, abolitionist, and outright communist/anarchist sentiments. You simply aren’t allowed to distribute it anywhere on a high school campus.
Because ethics questions love focusing on individual choices, not the systems causing the problem in the first place.
Because ownership is never questioned.
The biggest psyop in modern civilization is believing someone has the right to something as long as they have already “owned” it.
Just upvoted this to 666. So you all know
I don’t mind stealing bread from the mouths of decadents.
I don’t know why but TIL Vedder was the singer for Temple. Can’t believe it took me that long to realize.
my first read I thought you meant STP and I was like ??? how do u make that mistake??
actually it’s a really cool story, Chris Cornell is the vocalist in Temple but he was struggling to hit the low notes on that song and Eddie was in the studio waiting to practice with Pearl jam and just stepped up and started singing that part, next time he was around Chris asked him to record it.
was Eddie’s first time on any record apparently! i didn’t know that part until today
I’ve always loved the way Chris explains it, “When we started rehearsing the songs, I had pulled out “Hunger Strike” and I had this feeling it was just kind of gonna be filler, it didn’t feel like a real song. Eddie was sitting there kind of waiting for a (Mookie Blaylock) rehearsal and I was singing parts, and he kind of humbly—but with some balls—walked up to the mic and started singing the low parts for me because he saw it was kind of hard. We got through a couple choruses of him doing that and suddenly the light bulb came on in my head, this guy’s voice is amazing for these low parts. History wrote itself after that, that became the single.”
But I can’t feed on the powerless when my cups already overfilled.
Because it’s easier to question the desperate than the powerful… flips the whole perspective when you think about it.
Typically, when you are “stealing bread”, the implication is that you’re taking it from someone equally needy. Capitalist propaganda loves to frame the theft of bread as an attack on low-wage grocery store workers, middle-income truckers and assistant managers, and impoverished agricultural workers.
You never see “stealing bread” framed against the backdrop of a garbage dumpster with a lock on it, to prevent people from taking food that’s been thrown in the trash.
It is never unethical to steal food. It is unethical to stop someone from stealing food, or report someone for stealing food, or to arrest someone for stealing food.
Edit: ITT, sociopaths thinking their rationalizations for denying food to people are moral. It is NEVER unethical to steal food, got it? If someone is stealing food, it’s because they’re hungry, and they can’t afford it. If you question that, you’re just an asshole.
What if you have enough food and are stealing it from some who doesnt have enough?
Or what if it’s those crazy luxury foods, something like waguy beef or stuff, and you’re stealing it to sell it forward? And you’re going to buy a new television with the money
Being pedantic it’d be more correct as something like “it’s never unethical to steal food to feed someone, from someone that has more than enough”. But that doesn’t have such a nice ring to it
Or what if you’re a lazy asshole that decided it’s easier to just steal food than do anything for society in exchange for food?
In a democracy, political authority flows from the body of the people to the government. All power wielded by the government is borrowed from the people. We The People invest our political authority in government, which uses it to provide services and justify the collection of taxes.
We are each owed a return on that investment: A “citizenship dividend”. That “lazy asshole” who chooses not to do anything else is already owed a basic subsistence for the use of his political authority. He shouldn’t need to steal food or do anything more for society to merely maintain his existence.
Cool, you’ve added a little out for misanthropes to claim that anyone who can’t feed themselves is lazy and doesn’t deserve food.
Then I’d rather feed them and help them become a functioning member om society, than imprison them and feed them in prison.
“It’s never unethical to steal food to feed someone, from someone that has more than enough, if you don’t have any other more ethical options to get it soon enough” sounds even less catchy
There you go, the MAGA rationalization: I’d rather have 1000 children starve, than have a system where one person I dislike might gain something that I’ve determined they don’t deserve.
Or maybe we could have a system where the people that actually need it are given food, in order for there to be no excuse for stealing food.
Stealing food is still stealing, when you do it you indirectly increase the price of it for everyone else.
If everyone else just puts aside a bit of money to pay for food for those that actually need it, we can have both no starving and no excuse for stealing. Which would result in food being cheaper for everyone.
The actual answer is that in western culture, it’s generally taken as a given that stealing is wrong. It’s in the 10 commandments.
“Hoarding” doesn’t hold the same position in western mythos.
Applying pressure to an assumed moral certainty (thou shalt not steal) is fundamentally interesting. Applying pressure to a position where people don’t hold culturally ethical baggage (hoarding) is much less so.
The actual answer is that in western culture, it’s generally taken as a given that stealing is wrong. It’s in the 10 commandments.
So is “coveting”.
Hoarding is applied coveting, in the same way that engineering is applied physics.
And for a long time, we did indeed, understand that coveting was wrong. We implemented actual, progressive taxation to prevent it. We used to have a 91% top-tier income tax rate. We had that rate in the most prosperous decades of US history.
Bible does state quite clearly that rich people don’t go to heaven. Mark 10:25 which is cleverly ignored by most people.
Also greed is one of seven deadly sins, althougj deadly sins are not a biblical thing but invented few hundred years after by early christians.
I always thought of hoarding as a way of stealing from everyone
Read a recent poll that said 63% of U.S. adults believe that extreme wealth is not a moral issue. Only 18% think it’s morally wrong. Sad. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/19/appendix-detailed-tables-us-morality/
holy shit. how much soft power do billionaires have??
I think the common mistake is projecting our own thoughts onto a hypothetical. They try to put themselves in that situation, “if I had this much money I would do all these things” but the truth is that to be in that position there is a fundamental lack of humanity required and it’s not easy to just disregard that.
It’s a mental health issue. They have OCD that manifests itself as financial hoarding.
If they had a million cats, we wouldn’t keep calling them great cat owners, and give them more cats until they had a billion cats. We would recognize that that many cats is bad for the community, remove the cats from their care, and get them help for their mental illness.
So let’s take away the money that is the focus of their OCD, and put them into mental hospitals until their brains are wired properly.
When it’s phrased as wealth inequality, things are usually a little different but yeah, a ton of that survey is depressing. I mean, gambling is lower than shit like pornography… (Although again, context could change that, too, I suppose.)
Because one of these has a clear answer
I they both have clear answers, but they’re obscured by which class you’re in. Rich? Obviously it’s not wrong to hoard. Poor? Obviously you need to eat to survive. Because of this bias, the argument for poor’s needing to steal will always be the debate, always leaving room for the rich to argue against it and justify punishment for people who find ways to make ends meet.
But whom are you stealing it from? If its another poor starving family suddenly its not so clear anymore. If its the hoarding rich guy go the fuck ahead, steal it even if you aren’t starving
Exactly. This man is a role model and did what I hope I would be able to do, but I wouldn’t expect that to be standard behavior, nor would I find it unforgivable if someone wasn’t able to literally starve to death while surrounded by food. Like, it is morally wrong imo, but that’s an incredible amount of self control that I would not have expected to be possible before learning about him.
This is it.
Because the people who create those ethics “tests” are not serving you, but are serving the subset of society that causes the second situation.
For a serious answer, because ethics is concerned with self. You already know the answer to the second question and will very likely never be in that situation. You do not know the answer to the first and have a much higher likelihood of being in that situation.
both questions are concerned with self and society in general.
the first question puts survival up for debate, and the second question puts capitalism up for debate.
i’d say that most of us know the answers to both questions, but only ever asking the first question & never the second, helps people to form the idea that capitalism is just how things always have to be, and that it could/should never be changed.
I think you have a lot of beliefs about the first that are not stated. There are many many ways to frame the first in which you would not so easily answer yes. There are very few ways to frame the second in which it’s ethical.
There are very few ways to frame the second in which it’s ethical.
yeah, that’s the point of the post. it’s clearly unethical, and yet, capitalism continues.
I know the answer to the first
I’m sure your thought process involves a lot more than what is mentioned in the prompt. So you most likely do not know the answer to the first, even though you think you do.
Property is theft. Food shouldn’t be witheld from those in need. Stealing bread is an artificial problem that shouldn’t exist. Ezpz
Because the people that need the second lesson don’t concern themselves with ethics courses.
“Why is no one asking this ethical question I am currently asking?”
I’m 14 and this is deep
MBAs
