Sick child argument?

Economics Political Theory
1

I’ve been reading Bastiat, and he states that:

Each of us has a natural right — from God — to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.

I agree with this assertion. However, I stand on a dillema. Someone proposed the “sick child” idea, where one would have a sick child which needs medicine, and therefore the morality of the action protecting the life by stealing medicine is less than the immorality of stealing the medicine, therefore making the robbery moral. I disagree, since I believe that the person has no right to steal, even if someone is sick.

However, is there another way to answer this argument other than “I don’t believe someone should steal under any circumstances”?

2

Yeah. If the thief provided compensation afterwards it might be excused. Which is to say, he will be in debt to the person from whom he stole.

-Jon

3

Robbery is never moral, but im that situation all of us would probably commit an immoral act. Morality isn’t determined by the ends you wish to achieve. That is the same grave fallacy that supports taxation I believe.

4

So it could be excusable for someone to steal under extreme circumstances, as long as they pay back their debt when they have the possibility to pay back.

5

Yes, more or less.

-Jon

6

i’d say it depends on how you define excuseable. In my opinion stealing is immoral under any circumstances, but i would act immorally if i had to steal to save a loved one and had no other option. If some fantastic scenario occured in which someone stole from me because it was their only choice to save a sick child, i’d understand and would forgive them.

7

Well, now, I think that by some moral calculus, it might in fact be moral to steal the medicine. If it be accepted that the parent has an obligation to provide for and care for his or her child, but they lack any means to acquire the medicine without stealing, than they have the competing moral imperitives to respect the property rights of the person who currently possesses the medicine and to care for the child who needs the medicine.

How do we decide which morality takes precedence? It is an immoral act not to fulfill your obligations, and an immoral act to steal. If it can be demonstrated that the least harm (I’m gonna get it for that one) is done by stealing the medicine, since one not doing so deprives a child of life you are obligated to protect, and the other merely potential revenue (I’m kinda assuming a pharmacy here, it can easily get more complicated), the theivery may in fact be the less immoral, thus the moral, action.

8

Only an inconsistent moral calculus could find such an action moral. Stealing is immoral, and letting your child die of some disease if you can prevent it is immoral. Which is the lesser of two evils is a personal preference and not related to morality. Choosing the preferred less immoral action does not turn it into a moral action. The reason this is important is because the pharmacy is within its right to defend its medicine from these sick thief parents haha. And the reason that is important to me is because I tend to define morality as actions that can exist in parallel.

9

In that case, however, it probably wouldn’t even come up. Your willingness to forgive based on the circumstance tends to imply that they wouldn’t have had to steal in the first place, but rather you would have given it to them or sold it at a discount when you learned of their circumstances.

I think this is somewhat a question of what you would do if you were on a jury. An impoverished parent with no other options stole from a pharmacy to save their sick child. The pharmacy presses charges. Do you jail/fine the parent?

10

I usually point out that it is stealing and the person who does it takes a risk. In this case, the risk of prosecution is pretty low if the victimized has anything to do with it. So we can see the problem with statist judiciary systems. There is a wall of separation between the victims and the victimizer, and that is the state. It can be very difficult to engage in this sort of risk-based analysis of actions such as stealing medicine for child when the punlishment imposed is detached from the private property matrix.

11

A valid and useful morality cannot demand that you have to either die or violate it. Risk is a different question, I’m talking about certain death.

Any such dilemma is a form of “lifeboat ethics”, and is properly outside the context of morality. Such a situation is caused by a breach of morality somewhere along the chain of actions that led to it. I know, you can always contrive a situation where there is apparently no one at fault, but nonetheless, a breach of morality has brought the situation outside of “pure” moral choices.

That breach may be unintentional, and it may even have been the most rational decision from incomplete information. The moral breach does not have to carry blame (that’s not the purpose of moral principles), but nonetheless, an action that violates what morality would demand if known fully will have consequences. The universe doesn’t care about your intentions or how much information you had.

Edit: I’ll add that one of the primary purposes of morality is to avoid such situaitions in the first place. This hypothetical is not an argument against moral principles, but one that reveals the importance of them.

12

You could state WHO you are stealing from. Maybe the person who has the medicine is in desperate need of, say, food, and the only way he can get food is to SELL the medicine he has.

What if you are taking away the last vile of medicine that someone else would pay for who also has a “sick child”? But in all reality I think everyone would do it.

Is it justifiable - yes. Is it morally justified - no. One could also use utilitarian grounds for justification.

13

histhasthai, I completely agree. I would add that we can discuss/attempt to solve these difficult moral problems if and when they arise; such problems only serve to complicate and confound what are, typically, rather simple moral imperatives, i.e. do not steal, rescue when you are able. If and when these two imperatives come into conflict outside the realm of theory, their reconciliation will be a matter of moral judgment that, I am sure, very few moral agents will feel compelled to call into any great question.

14

Validity is partly what is at question here, and I think you need to establish better that no valid morality can demand your death. As for useful ones, many of the warrior cultures of the world have had circumstances where death was the best option (to avoid dishonor or the like).

Are you saying that one person’s immoral action voids all considerations of morality from the chain of events that follow? Is a bodyguard who contracted to do so not obligated to take a bullet for his employer because someone has attempted the immoral act of shooting at him?

This is a somewhat ridiculous example, but if your ship has plenty of lifeboats, but several get destroyed by an angry whale and your ship is sinking, the dilemmas are not brought about by immorality. One can only make the best decisions one can based on the information that is reasonably available to them. Doing so, you act morally, and if you fail to do so, you act immorally. It can thus easily be done, as in the case of natural disasters and the like, that situations like these could arise with no precedent immorality.

15

Do you actually propose that this is a simple moral imperitive? Because I beg to differ. There are all sorts of good reasons not to rescue someone, particularly if their predicament is one they brought about themselves, or if you just know them to be a bad person.

16

I mean to say that it is simple relative to the example proposed about the medicine.

17

The purpose of morality is the furtherance of your life. (I’m sure you’ll disagree with that, but if so, you can disregard what I wrote.) There’s no benefit to honor if you are dead, and anyone putting your dishonor on your family is committing a logical fallacy.

No. The fact of a conflict between morality and life implies a previous breach, but a breach does not necessarily imply there will be such a conflict. A breach runs the risk of it, which is one reason to try as hard as possible not to commit such breaches, but it does not guarantee it. Such a conflict is prima facie evidence that the breach has broken the moral context - not all breaches have that consequence.

No, no more than whatever brought the mother and child to their circumstance breaks the pharmacist out of his moral context. They are separate contexts, (unless the event is part of a larger one, such as the complete breakdown of society or something). The pharmacist still has the right to protect himself from theft. I would question the morality of accepting a job that requires the possibility of such a sacrifice, but that’s a different kind of question.

If you prefer, think “mistake” when I say moral breach. I consider them fundamentally the same class of things (with various species), but I have a much broader definition of morality than most people, so it’s understandable if you disagree. Even mistake might sound too severe for you, but understand that my meaning of it is “not the correct action for the circumstances”. And, as I said before, neither one automatically implies blame - the opposite of “moral” is not necessarily “immoral” as the term is commonly understood. Not having enough lifeboats to account for the whale eating some was not the correct action for the circumstances, by definition, since the whale did eat them and left you in the lurch. It may have been completely rational to not take more boats, it may have even been irrational to take more, nonetheless, the reality is that it was not the “correct” decision in the end.

Think of it this way, you have a map of an underground cave complex. The map is like a moral code, it helps you figure out the way to get where you want to go. You’re walking around, and realize you made a wrong turn somewhere, so you no longer know where you are. There’s no indication of what part of the cave you are in, so the map is suddenly no help. The map (you’re moral code) no longer gives you any basis for deciding to turn right, turn left, or go straight. But you have to go somewhere. Flip a coin, pray, dowse, whatever, but it’s no longer a question of the “moral code” map guiding you through the cave. The immediate goal then is to get your bearings as soon as possible, but until you do, you have no guidance. to your actions (at least not from the map).

18

I think you hit on what will be one of the real obstacles to this discussion, which is the somewhat ambiguous definition of morality. What is it? Does it differ from ethics, and if so, how? How do we determine morality in the first place? Those following the Rothbardian train of thought will say we can derive it from human nature, but even this I find tenuous.

I don’t really expect for the question of “how ought we to live” to be definitively answered here.

19

Morality is a set of rules or guidelines defining how one should act. Determining what is moral is a long and exploratory process. Morality is not defined as that which furthers man, or that which is innate in mans nature. A parasitical class, such as a politician, can be defined as perfectly moral if we define morality as that which good for mans survival. Also my nature would tell me to murder if I caught my wife cheating on me. Neither of those things are a good moral ruler.

There are some basic rules I think I would agree a moral theory should possess. It should be internally consistent and non self detonating. Apply to all men, at all times, for all time. A moral action can never eliminate or impede the moral actions of another. Lastly there is no such thing as a positive moral action, such as one that must be performed or you are doomed to immorality. So if you see a child drowning you have no moral obligation to save that child, but it would be preferrable to me to do so. Note however that if you jump to save the child, then you are indeed obligated to follow through, there is no backing out at that point. The reason is that since you jumped in to save the kid from drowning, other people that may have noticed will not jump in as well since it could impede the rescue.

20

Oh, I know it. I know I’m using terms, and even concepts, that differ from common understanding, even from the understanding common to the relatively small world of libertarian thinking - which itself differs from that of the wider world. To make it worse, there’s a granuarity to it that leaves even me without clear terms for some of the parts.

I don’t know how to resolve it without a whole long, contentious thread that would probably have to include parts of the last thread we encountered each other in, and with me making terms up as I went along.

The best I can do is make it as clear as possible what my concepts are, and see if any part of it rings true to others. If it helps, my starting point is the objectivist view of morality, but I’ve diverged even from that somewhat.