The Blurry Line Between Right and Wrong
An interesting story out of the BBC: one priest, Father Tim Jones, recently gave an incredibly provocative sermon where he offered controversial advice–to shoplift. His argument is basically that those who are less fortunate may often turn to illegal means: they can rob, they can become prostitutes, etc… Jones is arguing that of these “evils,” shoplifting, especially from large corporations, has the least impact on society, and thus, somehow, is the least immoral. Of course from a psychological standpoint this is our intuition. It is easy to do harm to large corporations because we think that we are spreading our damage out evenly among more individuals, and, moreover, those individuals are faceless people wearing suits. However, giving this more thought, we can also sense that if we were to allow this to happen as a society (or be more forgiving of poor people who steal from big corporations to get by), we could very quickly slip into a system of mutual distrust. Before you know it, we will all be having to have our bags checked at entrances and exits, with costs going up for everyone. On the whole, this might leave fewer people with jobs, and the cycle could continue to spiral out of control. As we know, many of the biggest financial blunders of the recent years had to do with tiny misjudgments that added up to larger and more catastrophic costs, with the resulting mutual distrust freezing credit and badly hurting the economy. One thing we must beware of is the allure of thinking that our tiny, seemingly inconsequential decisions won’t matter much in the long run. As history and research have shown us, it’s the little decisions that we gloss over that end up hurting us most in the end.
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Dear Dan,
You misrepresent my argument, which is not that the poor should shoplift, or that the desperate may steal. The argument of the sermon is that when people are released from prison we know that the vast majority of them will struggle to find work for some time: we should therefore not make them wait 2 months to receive state benefits, because that pushes many of them back into crime. The discussion about which crime we would prefer them to commit highlights the folly of leaving them with nothing but crime to support themselves. When we spend £1000 per week per prisoner, it is silly to undo any potential rehabilitation just because we don’t initiate the paperwork until they leave custody. I make reference to the well established Christian moral teaching that in genuinely desperate situations, property ceases to be private: eg. in the event of a fire, one just uses the available fire extinguishers without seeking permission of their owners. Or when one is starving and is refused charity, one has a high moral responsibility to feed oneslef if it can be done without endangering the lives of others. The breakdown of social trust which you refer to is initiated by the lack of charity, not by the taking of essential food.
PS. I really enjoyed all your other posts!