Stealing is moral?

It should come as no surprise that if killing turned out to be a difficult moral concept ... well, OK, as a moral concept it's not all that difficult, but how we try to moralize the immoral certainly is ... it is not going to be all that much easier with stealing. The law the world round also makes various distinctions, sometimes depending on the value of the thing stolen, or its size, or sometimes simply whoever was the owner. All of this is, of course, irrelevant for our discussion here, for like with killing the last time, we need to think very specifically whether there is ever a case in which stealing is moral.

Granted, our review of killing merely revealed that killing is never moral, regardless of how hard we try to justify it. We can make some headway legally, I suppose, but on moral grounds, the rightness of the laws permitting such acts can be challenged. Killing is wrong, and trying to justify it on any grounds just makes you wrong too. But stealing? Surely there must be a difference here. Stealing isn't even in the same class with murder, is it? Well, is it? We should probably agree here at the onset what we mean by stealing (or theft, if you prefer more formal words). When I use the term here; that is, in this post; I mean the acquisition of something belonging to another without their consent. Be patient, please, for I know there are a couple of rubbery words in that definition, but how they should be understood will (hopefully) become clear before the end of the post.

There are lots of ways to do this: one could take whatever it is when the owner isn't watching (what we usually call burglary); or, the owner could be watching and we force him or her to give us what we want, say, by threatening him with a weapon of some sort (what we generally refer to as armed robbery); or another possibility is that the owner is watching but not paying enough attention (e.g. shoplifting). These are the obvious forms of stealing, however.

There are less obvious forms, too, and they generally involve deceit. I could get someone to lend me something and I simply never give it back. A variation of this would be borrowing something under certain conditions that would get me off the hook for having to return whatever it was I borrowed, knowing full well (or at least being pretty sure) that those conditions will come about and not informing the lender of such. It sounds of course like this only has to do with borrowing and lending, but this last scenario also covers sales of many kinds. If I lead you to believe you can make a lot of money by giving me money or buying a "security", but I know that I'm going to dump that security the first chance I get and make money off of that too (of which you will see none), that's pretty much the same thing. In fact, we usually call that a scam and that's fundamentally what happened in the most recent financial meltdown.

And this is where things get grey and cloudy. I'm fully aware that those responsible for the crash knew what they were doing, and I'm also aware that they were operating, for the most part, within the framework of current law, but what they were doing was immoral and no amount of legal argumentation will ever make it right. The realist in me knows that you can't really punish immoral behavior, at least not like you can illegal behavior, but to then turn around and treat these people as if they were honorable, upstanding, worthy members of our society is ... well, disgusting, to put it mildly.

What we need to keep in mind, though, is that even passively defending the perpetrators allies you with them and their actions; that is, it makes you as immoral as they are. And yes, in case you are wondering, what amazes me more than anything else coming out of the 2008 crash is the sheer absence of moral outrage. It gives us pause to think about whether we should even consider ourselves a moral society anymore, or if morality is even worth thinking about. It should be, but is it?