No. My behavior is derived from ethics, not from law.
What if the company you’re stealing from is ethically bankrupt?
Like Adobe / Microsoft / Google / Meta / … maybe most large enterprises ? No question about it.
downloading software isnt theft, soooo unless you are breaking into their offices its not really stealin from them.
Warez piracy is anyway not “stealing” since you’re not taking the digital item away, tis something which can be infinitely copied.
I would steal your heart, OP.
♥️
Um… I feel… so… um… 😊
Wait… not literally right? 😧
Flat lines
I would download so many cars
No. Mostly because places where the rule of law has broken down, the response to theft is often pretty brutal. It stops being “off to jail for a short bit” and starts being “here’s a tire with gasoline in it, placed around you and lit on fire”. When all we have ever known are a society dominated by the rule of law, it’s easy to forget that part of the reason written law exists, is to keep punishment proportionate with crimes. And also how disproportionate that response could be, without the law.
Not from people that earned what they have. Corporations mmmm idk.
No, I wouldn’t want anyone to steal from me so why would I want to steal from anyone else?
I would never spend a single dollar at Walmart again if stealing was consequenceless
Well, no legal consequence doesn’t mean no consequence. Walmart could definitely hire gangs to murder you (even if murder is still illegal in this hypothetical, they could just bribe the police to not investigate your murder).
I’ll hire my own gang to murder Walmart’s gang
If theft was not a crime, it wouldn’t be stealing.
Yes it would.
No, it wouldn’t. If murder wasn’t a crime- murder wouldn’t be illegal. It would just be killing someone. Stealing is a crime. If it wasn’t, it would just be taking things.
Stealing as a concept has existed for way longer than laws are
If they’d wasn’t a crime, it would be taking. Not stealing.
Nonhuman animals, which don’t have laws, still steal from each other.
No, they take from one another.
Wiktionary defines it as: To take illegally, or without the owner’s permission, something owned by someone else without intending to return it.
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The prevailing morality is to follow an arbitrary set of rules, mostly made by and for a class of people who have dominated the political sphere for most of human history. E.g. “If this will violate Ownership™ of a thing as defined by law, you shouldn’t do it.”
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Another kind of morality is to consider the effects of an action. E.g. “If this makes someone’s life noticeably harder or more miserable, you shouldn’t do it.”
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Another kind is to look at the social relations. E.g. “If this enriches yourself at the cost of someone who is already worse off than you, you shouldn’t do it.”
What source of moral code do you subscribe to?
Kant’s categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
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No. Theft goes against my personal ethics and religious values.
Probably too busy stealing back what is mine.
My boss squeezes 3 person’s worth of labor out of me and doesn’t even pay me for 1 with no qualms at all.
I wouldn’t feel bad about stealing groceries since my local grocer admitted to price fixing and has jacked the prices to an inhumane degree. But like from a person or a small business or something, no.
No. When I do something I’m not wondering if it’s against the law, I’m wondering how this affects someone else.
I would collect taxes if I held the power of physical violence over a community. All taxation is theft, amiright?
But seriously, stealing is a crime because prevailing thought within the community is that taking something that someone else has a claim on is wrong. If the prevailing thought was that it was not wrong, it wouldn’t be against the law, but we also would call it something else… Like taxation.
That is such a stupid take. Tax money is spend on things you use
Well tbf if someone stole my wallet at gunpoint but used a small portion of the money stolen to buy me lunch I’d still be pretty mad about him spending the rest of my money paying off his Haliburton credit card.
Yes, good thing this metaphor does not apply to tax
Yes, but the bad thing is that it does.
Not a majority of the money is spend on corruption like where do you live in fucking Russia or something? Zimbabwe? Also noome forces you to stay in that country for sure. I also left my home country.
I agree. Guess I should have put a /s on the slogan. But it’s still taking a portion of something that is technically owned by one person or group for the betterment of the community.
Some people see that as theft and so would call it stealing even though there isn’t a law against it. My point is that this question is asked from a particular vantage point and what constitutes theft and the law may be different from one person to another.
Some people also think the earth is flat, it has nothing to do with reality.
If you count software piracy, then yes. In fact, I’ll admit to having done it within the past year (without giving specific dates for obvious reasons).
