In the other, you could be left for dead in an alley in Oakland.
That is very crass. Tell that to someone who lost a big chunk of their savings. "Just numbers in a database" indeed.
It’s the next level of risk up from people who buy stocks because the price is going up without checking the fundamentals. If all you do is hang around with other people hyping the same thing, it’s really easy to focus on the “number goes up” part and not want to be the person spoiling the party by asking about value.
Would you say the same if a pension fund ran with your retirement, since it is invested in some stock index, most likely in previous metals, and probably a slice in crypto?
I doubt those who think that in the end victims are partly responsible as there are things they could have done differently, would change their mind.
Remember, the claim isn’t that the traditional finance world is without problems but rather that people who deliberately seek out high-risk investments do share some responsibility when those fail. Someone who trusted Enron’s public audit reports was more comprehensively failed than someone who sought out a company specifically incorporated in the Bahamas to avoid compliance with US regulations!
Who were these hypothetical savers putting their money in a safe place?
Few people should have been unaware of the risks they were taking by investing in crypto.
Certainly not saying they deserve to be defrauded, but I am saying they took obvious risks and then got burned by those risks.
"The very first Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, collapsed in 2014". Different reason, similar outcome.
And Bitcoin was down 2/3 from peak when FTX collapsed. Close to losing it all. And enough doomsayers to know any gambler was running that risk.
And countless prior examples in lots of markets showing that speculation in risky assets is very risky!
You often don't know the specifics of why something is risky, so even if a particular outcome was unlikely, that doesn't mean an investment was "savings".
Granted, I haven’t seen any scientific evidence to suggest that a lack of money causes a lack of ability to reason (and thus a lack of responsibility for one’s own actions) but my own anecdotal experience does suggest it
Nothing.
The wealthy stole the commons. They cut down or fenced off the fruit trees, claimed all the common land, poisoned all the natural water sources, and you think it's immoral to steal to survive? Even equivocating it with theft on a grand scale?
Honestly I think your moral compass needs a tune-up, if it ever worked at all. I'm not saying that to be mean - you need to understand this, or you're morally deficient.
We live in a world where scarcity is artificial. That some people need to steal to eat is an indictment on all of us, and blaming the victim is ghastly. Like, did you never even watch Le Mis? People understood this hundreds of years ago. Children understand this.
No circumstance whatsoever justifies such behavior. None.
You heard "point a weapon at a stranger and demand the contents of his pockets".
And, since this seems to be really confusing to a lot of people here for some reason, stealing tens/hundreds of millions of dollars from people is in fact unambiguously worse than mugging someone for their wallet. It's far more violent, and causes far more suffering.
Receipts:
How about from 19th-century literature?
If you have a problem with the way the world works, there is always a non-violent course of action to take to change it. There is no other option. If you think there is another option all you have to do is say so, I’m sure the keepers of law and order and the voting masses on whose behalf they act are equally willing to deal with whatever you choose.
"Criminal behavior" is a construct of human society. Morality is, too, for that matter. I have no problem with someone stealing food to survive. Hopefully they are able to do so without harming anyone else. If someone does get harmed, I won't hold the thief blameless, but I also can't find it in my heart to condemn them, either.
> The consequences of propagating lawlessness are far greater than starving to death.
That's a false dichotomy.
> Unless, of course, you have a self-centered point of view and/or no principles.
That's absolutist, no-true-scotsman, ad-hominem nonsense.
> If you have a problem with the way the world works, there is always a non-violent course of action to take to change it.
Earth's long history would seem to disagree with you, as much as I genuinely do wish you were right about that.
Do you think no one irl ever stole bread to feed their family only to be extremely punished? ...
> No one needs to steal to eat, some people choose to steal rather than earn.
You're wrong. You're a hundred kinds of wrong. That mindset is a deep, deep sickness.
> Stealing is immoral regardless of the circumstance
If the choice is between stealing and starvation, the moral thing to do is steal. Which is, in fact, the scenario we are talking about.
Not everyone can earn - and in a society where wages have become untethered from productivity for over 50 fucking years, where the social contract is broken and ground into dust, where healthcare and housing are seen as privileges rather than rights, you might start to expect getting pushback on such untethered and inhuman views.
> don’t take your moral philosophy from Disney movies and broadway.
Better than taking it from literal comicbook villains.
Wages have never been tethered to productivity, arbitrage has existed since before there was even a currency. Healthcare and housing has always been and always will be a privilege, your human rights only extend so far as they do not infringe upon someone else’s human rights. Doctors and construction workers cannot be compelled against their will to do work, neither can the collective taxpayer.
My gut feeling here is that this isn't even a moral issue at all, but I've been having trouble articulating that point. You absolutely hit the nail on the head with this.
This one! Our world is pretty backwards! If you can't see that, you must live a privileged, sheltered life.
Do you think a world where medical bills can bankrupt people is not a backwards world? Do you think a world with homeless people is not a backwards world? Do you think a world where we incarcerate people by the millions for smoking a plant is not a backwards world? And these are just a small sampling of things that happen in the US.
If you truly don't believe we live in a backwards world, I don't know what to say. You're just so completely out of touch with the reality we live in that there's no way to have a productive discussion.
Big fat citation needed.
> Stealing is immoral regardless of the circumstance
That's your opinion and your conception of morality. My moral code isn't so rigid that I can't imagine a world of nuance, a world where things aren't black and white, where things don't fit neatly into little boxes.
There are plenty of people in the world who end up in bad circumstances due to things outside their control. And yes, some of them need to steal to eat. Even if it's just for a little while, so they can work on improving their circumstances. Something that's incredibly hard to do when you're malnourished.
Of course there is - being mugged(or having stuff stolen from you) can ruin your life, not even in any physical sense but psychologically it can be devastating. I've had a bike stolen from my house, I didn't even witness it being stolen or anything, just one morning I woke up and the house was broken into and my bike gone - relatively minor financial inconvenience in the grand scheme of things, but for the next 2 years I hated living in that place, I was uncomfortable in my own house and scared of walking around, I honestly felt violated in the sanctum of my own home and couldn't get relaxed around there again. Eventually we moved and in the large portion it was exactly because of that.
So please tell me, even assuming if that person stole my bike to buy bread - how can it possibly have been moral given the impact it had on the life of another person?
It's not the job of an individual to keep their property available in case a desperate person needs to steal it in order to survive.
The implication of what you're saying is that any crime is morally justified as long as the perpetrator is doing it in order to survive, and the victim isn't killed. Which is insane.
That doesn't seem insane to me. I think you've phrased it in a somewhat unfair way. But I don't think doing what you need to do to survive is really a moral issue. Certainly it's best to secure your survival without hurting anyone else. But if the choice is between death and making someone else uncomfortable, I don't think I'd blame someone for choosing life if they have to make someone else uncomfortable or inconvenience them.
Certainly the scales have more trouble balancing when it moves from discomfort/inconvenience toward physical harm, especially permanent physical harm. But also consider that in many cases people do have a choice how they react: a shopkeeper, when confronted with someone stealing bread, can get physically involved and risk their safety for the sake of that bread, or they can let it go and consider it the cost of doing business.
This is why most people recommend that if you get mugged, you don't try to play the hero: you just hand over what the mugger wants, and let them go. Your wallet or phone or laptop isn't worth your life. This doesn't make it ok for the mugger to do what they did, but ultimately what matters is the outcome: do you want to get out of it relatively unscathed, or do you want to risk injury or death? Once you're in that situation, you do get to choose how you react.
Anyhow, that doesn't make it "right" or moral or whatever if the thief ends up hurting the shopkeeper during the theft, but it's hard for me to get too up in arms if the thief has no alternative than stealing food. It's understandable, even if it's a bad outcome.
... You and I both know that your bike wasn't robbed to prevent starvation, making your example completely beside the point. If it had been robbed to prevent the starvation of a human, you ought to feel happy rather than violated - your small sacrifice saved a whole life!
America has more than enough wealth to feed everyone on the planet, but 10 million kids are hungry in the US right now. Someone is stealing that wealth, and it isn't muggers. Try to gain some perspective, despite the daily news telling you to be scared of the poor.
The US even still has tremendous opportunity to build a life and earn money. Stealing undermines one's ability and focus to build such a life and undermines the surrounding community as well.
You clearly think you're a great guy/gal/whatever for thinking that someone should be thrilled to be stolen from and you're oblivious to the nothing-but-more-misery this approach practically generates.
A contrived situation, no doubt (though not mine). But despite HNers claims to the contrary, some people actually do starve to death because they can't earn for a variety of reasons. And, rather than take care of those people, the US vilifies them.
This leads to a society where tech-bubbled freaks get slightly rabid at the notion that it's morally ok to steal to survive - even going so far as to flag such comments.
I laugh, but the tech community keeps putting up these red flags the last few decades, and it's actually worrying. The disconnect from reality is unfathomable. There's people here claiming that stealing bread to save your life is just as bad as stealing 8 billion dollars - that's unhinged on a level that's hard to imagine.
Yes, because they could have just asked and I would have given them food. Literally anyone would I'm sure.
The thief in that case choose the path that inflicts psychological damage, because they were too cowardly to just ask for food. In that case they have literally zero of my sympathy. Thieves are the worst people in the society just after murderers and rapists.
If someone needs to steal something (anything) in order to survive (an actually survival need), hopefully they will be able to do so in a way that doesn't cause a bystander the kind of difficulty you're talking about. Like they could steal the bicycle from a bike shop instead of a person's home.
But ultimately, if it's actually a survival need, I hope if push came to shove, I wouldn't put my psychological well-being (something that, when hurt, can be healed) above someone else's life (something that, when lost, cannot be returned).
Why is it odd? OP said stealing to survive is never immoral, to which I said that of course it is, because theft has a profound impact on the victim, no matter the reason for stealing. People who are victims of theft rarely know why they were stolen from, so they cannot adjust their emotional response as if every thief is stealing to feed their families - and I think acting as if that's a reasonable assumption in any way is well, unreasonable. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
>>But ultimately, if it's actually a survival need, I hope if push came to shove, I wouldn't put my psychological well-being
Sure, and neither would I, but I don't accept that stealing is the moral choice - the person could have literally knocked on my door and asked for food and I would have given them food, and I'm sure majority of people would as well. Again there is a bunch of assumptions there, but I find the whole conversation a bit disingenuous - there is of course actual undeniable theft where the alternative is death in various places around the world, but I refuse to accept that this is the kind of theft most people are talking about here - no one in any modern country is stealing to survive, literally every developed country has programs that will just give you food if you ask - dying from starvation should not be happening anywhere with even a semi functional social system.
Yes, you might decide that breaking your moral code to feed yourself or your family is an acceptable tradeoff, but it's a tradeoff nonetheless. It's a conscious choice. A lot of people in history made a decision to go hungry instead.
Children might see the world in Marxist generics where some ambiguous, but for some reason always "wealthy" people stole all the fruit trees and poisoned the water. Adults usually deal with specifics. Who are all these mysterious people are? Do you think the food just fell from the sky before the industrial age? What do you think happened to the people who stole before the industrial age, hungry or not?
The fact remains that we could feed everyone on the planet... if we chose to. Capitalism just doesn't incentivize us to do so.
You talk about how stealing bread to survive would be "breaking your moral code", but I think it's absurd that we've gotten to this point. How is a society moral if it allows people to starve? I won't say two wrongs make a right, but when society actively allows people to die of hunger, I think those tut-tutting about moral codes need some side-eyes and eye-rolls directed their way.
And we are all culpable to a certain extent, as members of that society. Perhaps those of us who donate our money or time to help those in need are a bit less culpable (along with people who are just scraping by and don't have the money or time to spare). But if we've benefited from that system (as I have), we share some of the blame (as I do). And go further and consider people who actively vote for politicians and policies that remove social safety nets and make it harder for people on the margins to feed themselves. All the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" the US who seem to think that no one deserves any help for anything. It's disgusting.
so, yes, someone who is hungry and stealing bread is the same as someone who is full and stealing bread should get the same punishment.