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Italian court rules food theft 'not a crime' if hungry

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Re: Italian court rules food theft 'not a crime' if hungry

#381

Post by eveningcoffee »

coldtea wrote: post #308
eveningcoffee wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, a poor choice of words then ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starvation )? Anyway, I do not think that this was the case you are describing. The guy acted like he was really starving. So perhaps he was, I really do not know, I am just describing what happened.

> Well, a poor choice of words then Well, beggars and homeless people rarely have dictionaries at hand. > The guy acted like he was really starving. So perhaps he was, I really do not know, I am just describing what happened. Well, he might very well be very hungry. Often people in those situations can have 2-3 days between a decent eat. But it's not necessary that they'd go buy something immediately as soon as they…

I think that what you are saying is right very often but not always.

I have had experience with people you are describing (these are usually local people), I have seen people who can by classified as amateur level professional beggars (usually foreign) and the guy did not really fit into none of such classifications.

It felt odd. So I would guess that he was either a higher level professional beggar or a man in despair. Given his reaction, I would put my wager on the first guess. But like I told, I do not know the truth.

But that is not the moral of my story.

What I wanted to point out is that there are people who possible do not hesitate to pretend.

When given supportive legal framework, these people can then develop a lifestyle that is based on the shoplifting.

When caught, they can then pretend that they are in desperate need and given such court decisions, people may let them go without involving the authorities.

I think that in this case the court made a right decision in general, but it should not become a common practice applied without though due diligence.

Re: Italian court rules food theft 'not a crime' if hungry

#382

Post by emodendroket »

notsotrue wrote: post #366
emodendroket wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So do you think, then, that the homeless should forego food until the state steps in out a principled concern for the free market?

What I think is that the burden should be shouldered by the state, and not small business owners. What this ruling does, is place the burden of caring for the 'hungry' on grocers, which is an unfair burden. Unless the courts decision came with a way to compensate the grocer, this ruling is idiotically naieve.

OK, but how do you think the actors in this story should behave, given that that is not the case? Should the homeless man starve to death? Or perhaps the judge should sentence him to years in prison for stealing less than ten dollars' worth of food?

Re: Italian court rules food theft 'not a crime' if hungry

#383

Post by emodendroket »

notsotrue wrote: post #377
lorenzhs wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone is saying poor people should be allowed to rob banks or mug people. The article is about stealing small amounts of food to stave off hunger.

Why not, food isn't the only item at the bottom of Maslows pyramid. Food being the only one you can steal. The rest must be acquired through currency.

Stealing a couple morsels of food and stealing thousands of dollars to rent an apartment don't really seem that similar to me.

Re: Italian court rules food theft 'not a crime' if hungry

#384

Post by jeffdavis »

mcv wrote: post #380
jeffdavis wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Land is special because it has always existed and (practically) you can't make more of it. There are reasons to make it private, but it's quite different from, say, a sculpture. Clay is nearly worthless, so if an artist turns it into a valuable sculpture, that value was created . Obviously, there's a spectrum here. Even land typically requires an investment to make it useful for anything. Food is largely created; esp…

The real difference is in inheritance. Unlimited inheritance over many generations creates a concentration of wealth and an aristocratic class that never earned the wealth they own. Ownership of something you worked to create is different from ownership of something due to luck of being born in the right crib.

Is that kind of "old money" an increasing or decreasing phenomenon?

I don't have the numbers, but it seems like a lot of the rich people that come to mind made most of their money during their lifetime.

Also, wealth naturally dissipates pretty quickly over generations. One reason is simple fan out. Another reason is that the children are likely to be less frugal, and there's s high chance that some descendants are downright reckless financially.

Re: Italian court rules food theft 'not a crime' if hungry

#385

Post by dragonwriter »

notsotrue wrote: post #376
dragonwriter wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging the act not to be subject to criminal sanction is very far from judging it to be "the right answer", or even legally permitted in systems which have both criminal and civil remedies.

So who pays the grocer? It's both unlawful, and unethical to place the burden of feeding hungry people on the shoulders of the grocer as a cost of selling food.

> It's both unlawful, and unethical to place the burden of feeding hungry people on the shoulders of the grocer as a cost of selling food.

If its the effect of the law and legal system, it is not unlawful for the burden to be placed there, even if the individual takings are unlawful. Whether its unethical or not is debatable; its basically equivalent to the government taxing sales of food and using it to fund feeding the indigent (since the grocers costs of doing business are recouped in the prices charged to customers), which (while rarely explicitly done with food) is actually a not-uncommon model for providing goods or services deemed essential (that is, taxing sales to those who can afford it, and using the proceeds to subsidize those who can't.)

Re: Italian court rules food theft 'not a crime' if hungry

#386

Post by objectivistbrit »

dragonwriter wrote: post #373
objectivistbrit wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'm an Objectivist - it's the only philosophy which gives a moral argument for property rights. (Most libertarian and free-market thinkers argue on pragmatic grounds, which means they are willing to compromise in the manner you describe). Virtue of Selfishness puts the case succinctly: "The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property r…

Er, no, moral arguments for property rights long predate Objectivism, including in lots of the 18th century works influential both in the founding of the country , which also tend to be foundational to modern libertarianism.

Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith and John Locke were hugely important historically in making the case for liberty. However, they were still products of their time and retain the influences of Christian ethics and Humean skepticism. Adam Smith, for instance, argued that competition was good because it maximised social well-being - which leads directly to the modern viewpoint that free markets are OK but that the government should step in to prevent monopolies and ensure businesses only make a "fair" profit (as defined by the government). This is what I mean by the pragmatic defence of property.

The most influential enlightenment philosopher was Kant, who was ostensibly pro-liberty but whose work paved the way for Hegel and Marx.

I might sound like a fanatic but if you actually read Rand it becomes clear how revolutionary her philosophy actually was. She's a system-builder, something unknown in modern philosophy (since Kant). Modern-day libertarianism is mostly a creation of Rothbard's, a one-time student of Rand's who later put all his energy into discrediting her while plagiarising her philosophy. (Just one example: the initiation of force as the basic social evil is an original concept of Rand's).

Re: Italian court rules food theft 'not a crime' if hungry

#387

Post by objectivistbrit »

michaelmrose wrote: post #363
objectivistbrit wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'm an Objectivist - it's the only philosophy which gives a moral argument for property rights. (Most libertarian and free-market thinkers argue on pragmatic grounds, which means they are willing to compromise in the manner you describe). Virtue of Selfishness puts the case succinctly: "The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property r…

Multiple issues here first and foremost the modern environment wherein people can fairly said to have earned what they get from society has never existed in history. The closest thing would be say primitive hunter gatherer societies. Ever since we started having specialists that paid for their decreased production by providing greater fitness for society as a whole benefit from society has only been tangentially rela…

"In a bizarrely unfair real society arguing that you have the right to maximally leverage whatever value you your dad and your grandpa managed to drag away and coral seems greedy and disingenuous."

You're arguing against aristocracy, not capitalism. In 19th century America (the most free society in history) there was a phrase "from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations." In the absence of state-protected income, inherited wealth never lasts long.

Re: Italian court rules food theft 'not a crime' if hungry

#388

Post by coryfklein »

jeffdavis wrote: post #364
coryfklein wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> See steego's reply. I have... maybe I'm missing something here. Aren't steego and I saying the same thing - he's saying it explicitly and I'm saying it by example? Maybe what I'm missing is what you were trying to say with the "search your car" analogy. Is it that privacy has a moral component to it? If so I can agree with that. I thought that "What argument can you use against it?" was meant to rhetorically imply…

I guess I think of moral issues as "leaf nodes" in an argument tree. Things you don't really need further justification for. You still need to weigh them against conflicting values, but if someone doesn't agree with you that issue X has a moral component at all (or if you disagree whether it's positive or negative), then you are bound to disagree forever. When an officer asks "why? What have you got to hide?", they'v…

That clarifies it a lot for me. I hadn't considered how that phrasing just removes the morality component from the question. It seems like a worthwhile skill to be able to detect such comments and point them out for what they are - I'm definitely going to develop that skill.

Re: Italian court rules food theft 'not a crime' if hungry

#389

Post by wfo »

eropple wrote: post #356
wfo wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you so obsessed with his personal life? Are you hoping you can neatly fit his life experiences into a box you call 'privilege' and then dismiss everything he has to say without argument? That sort of behavior is mostly frowned upon around here.

If you think that identifying privilege is to dismiss an argument, rather than to demonstrate its limitations--well, I would suggest some reflection about what is leading you to that assumption, 'cause that's not what vidarh is doing. It's not rhetorical, but rather functional--an understanding of sociological privilege is effectively a requirement to have a meaningful conversation about any of this. That, not "oh, y…

That assumption comes from experience, by which I mean in my experience almost every single time I have seen the word 'privilege' used it is used as a weapon to turn a discussion from a thoughtful, respectful one to hateful screaming about the personal lives of others, and to tell people that their opinion is irrelevant because their life experiences don't match the currently approved life experiences (some collection of socioeconomic disadvantage, minority ethnic background, female, LGBT). I don't really happen to meet the textbook definition of 'privilege', though I think that's pretty irrelevant here.

Do you really think it's important whether this particular poster is 'privileged'? If it came out that she were actually a poor trans orphan who grew up starving and had a severe physical disability, would it change the discussion? What if he were a 22 year old tech bro with a rich dad who chugs beer and red bull and harasses women in his spare time? Are the points he made less correct now? If you think so, you should reconsider how you evaluate arguments, discussions, perhaps words themselves. Does it matter for any real purpose of the discussion other than to help you condescendingly armchair-psychoanalyze him (as you have with me) and tell him that his background is why he believes what he believes, and that he just doesn't really understand and never can?

The beauty of discussions online (and there are plenty of drawbacks as well of course) is that you can express yourself, state an opinion, have a thoughtful discussion with others without people hating or dismissing you for who you are; only what you say. That's why most forums don't have a "real names policy". That's why most forums don't have a 'privilege-meter' next to usernames that uses a sophisticated algorithm to measure how many disadvantages a person has been through, spitting out a final number that tells us how seriously to take her posts. This kind of unsolicited digging into a person's personal life is generally frowned upon in any online discussion forum.

Re: Italian court rules food theft 'not a crime' if hungry

#390

Post by dragonwriter »

objectivistbrit wrote: post #386
dragonwriter wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er, no, moral arguments for property rights long predate Objectivism, including in lots of the 18th century works influential both in the founding of the country , which also tend to be foundational to modern libertarianism.

Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith and John Locke were hugely important historically in making the case for liberty. However, they were still products of their time and retain the influences of Christian ethics and Humean skepticism. Adam Smith, for instance, argued that competition was good because it maximised social well-being - which leads directly to the modern viewpoint that free markets are OK but that the…

Locke, who you dismiss with a vague handwave, made, in the Second Treatise on Government, an explicitly moral case for property rights founded upon the principal of individual autonomy. This was not a pragmatic argument. Locke, of course, greatly predates Rand; making a moral rather than pragmatic case for property rights is not an innovation of Rand's. (Locke goes on to make a pragmatic and moral case for popular government founded on the moral primacy of property.)

> I might sound like a fanatic

Quite.

> but if you actually read Rand it becomes clear how revolutionary her philosophy actually was.

I've read little of Rand and regret devoting time to doing even that; reading more isn't really something that seems worthwhile. But, certainly, nothing you've pointed to about her philosophy is revolutionary, or even novel (I'm sure there are some things in it that are at least the latter, though you haven't identified any.)

> She's a system-builder, something unknown in modern philosophy (since Kant).

Really? You can't swing a stick in a gathering of modern philosophers (and particularly those concerned with political/economic philosophy) without hitting a half-dozen system-builders. Rawls would be one notable example (from a radically different orientation than Rand.)

> Modern-day libertarianism is mostly a creation of Rothbard's, a one-time student of Rand's who later put all his energy into discrediting her while plagiarising her philosophy.

Rothbard (and Rand directly) are clearly influential in modern libertarianism, and particularly American right-libertarianism, but you have to take a pretty narrow view of what "modern libertarianism" is to see it all grounded in Rand (whether via "plagiarism" by Rothbard or not.)

> Just one example: the initiation of force as the basic social evil is an original concept of Rand's

No, actually, that's also found in (among other places) Locke's Second Treatise.

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