Jonathan Chan28 April 2013

Ethical Stealing: For the Greater Good

Generally speaking, stealing is always unethical. It is so for two reasons: you would be taking something that is not rightfully yours and you would be hurting the victim in some way, no matter how small or petty the theft. Because these consequences are unavoidable, it is almost certain that theft is unethical. However, there is a problem that challenges this idea: what if the stealer needs whatever that has been stolen more than you do?

It is generally accepted that the point of ethics is to improve the well-being of the society as a whole. It may be possible that the theft can do just that. To understand this, the effect of a theft can be measured by the amount that the victim suffers and by the amount that the stealer gains. For example, if a few kids decide to steal some candy bars from a convenience store, it would certainly benefit them, but not by a lot, and we have to consider that it is with those candy bars that the owner of the convenience store makes a living and feeds their family. Therefore, the amount from which the owner suffers is greater than the gains the kids make, making society in general worse off than before and therefore making the theft unethical.

Unfortunately, there are still some flaws with this way of thinking. Imagine a common, middle-class man who somehow manages to steal a ten-dollar bill from Bill Gates. According to the measurement of the effect of theft, Bill Gates would not miss his ten-dollar bill terribly, whereas the middle-class man would gain a lot more in proportion to the billionaire, thus essentially improving society and making the theft, in theory, ethical. However, nearly everyone would agree that this theft is wrong despite our argument. What is it that makes this theft unacceptable?

The problem here is that there must be a difference between need and want. The middle-class man may want the ten dollars, but it is doubtful that he needs it. On the other hand, a homeless person who steals a blanket from that same middle-class man gains around the same amount, but they most likely need the blanket, making that particular theft feel less unethical.

In 1943, Abraham Maslow created what is called Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It categorizes our different needs into five categories: self-actualization, esteem, love/belonging, safety and physiological, with self-actualization needs being at the top of the pyramid (least important) and physiological needs at the bottom. Physiological needs are what we consider as the absolute necessities for survival, such as the need for breathing, water, food, sex, sleep, homeostasis and excretion. In our example of the homeless person, by stealing the blanket, he is satisfying his need for sleep and homeostasis – that is, a shelter.

This explains why we feel that the homeless man’s theft is more ethical: we all believe that every single human being deserves at least the basic requirements for survival, or more precisely, to have their physiological needs satisfied. If what someone needs is redefined as their physiological needs and what someone wants is redefined as all the other needs in the hierarchy, we now have a clear-cut way of determining in which cases stealing could be ethical. In summary, it is ethical only if the gains of the stealer exceed the losses of the victim and if the gains of the stealer are used to satisfy their physiological needs. That way, society improves by giving to all human beings at least the necessities to life without severely incapacitating the victim of the theft. It is, after all, the goal of society to improve itself as a whole and the goal of ethics to guide us towards this process.