Because one of these has a clear answer
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
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I they both have clear answers, but they're obscured by which class you're in. Rich? Obviously it's not wrong to hoard. Poor? Obviously you need to eat to survive. Because of this bias, the argument for poor's needing to steal will always be the debate, always leaving room for the rich to argue against it and justify punishment for people who find ways to make ends meet.
But whom are you stealing it from? If its another poor starving family suddenly its not so clear anymore. If its the hoarding rich guy go the fuck ahead, steal it even if you aren't starving
Exactly. This man is a role model and did what I hope I would be able to do, but I wouldn’t expect that to be standard behavior, nor would I find it unforgivable if someone wasn’t able to literally starve to death while surrounded by food. Like, it is morally wrong imo, but that’s an incredible amount of self control that I would not have expected to be possible before learning about him.
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This is it.
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Because ethics questions love focusing on individual choices, not the systems causing the problem in the first place.
It is never unethical to steal food. It is unethical to stop someone from stealing food, or report someone for stealing food, or to arrest someone for stealing food.
Edit: ITT, sociopaths thinking their rationalizations for denying food to people are moral. It is NEVER unethical to steal food, got it? If someone is stealing food, it's because they're hungry, and they can't afford it. If you question that, you're just an asshole.
What if you have enough food and are stealing it from some who doesnt have enough?
Or what if it's those crazy luxury foods, something like waguy beef or stuff, and you're stealing it to sell it forward? And you're going to buy a new television with the money
Being pedantic it'd be more correct as something like "it's never unethical to steal food to feed someone, from someone that has more than enough". But that doesn't have such a nice ring to it
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"Never" and "always" are very difficult to use in a philosophical argument.
I can come up with a single ridiculous example that refutes a statement that uses such absolutes, once done the argument falls apart.
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It is never unethical to steal food.
Stealing food from someone else that doesn't have enough food.
People stealing from food banks and then throwing it away are pretty unethical in my book.
You are being too categorical. The capitalists are stealing food to hoard it, which is unethical.
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For a serious answer, because ethics is concerned with self. You already know the answer to the second question and will very likely never be in that situation. You do not know the answer to the first and have a much higher likelihood of being in that situation.
both questions are concerned with self and society in general.
the first question puts survival up for debate, and the second question puts capitalism up for debate.
i'd say that most of us know the answers to both questions, but only ever asking the first question & never the second, helps people to form the idea that capitalism is just how things always have to be, and that it could/should never be changed.
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As if 80% of western philosophy was written by well off people who sometimes owned slaves.
80% of western education is administered by partisan apparatchiks fulfilling an ideological mandate for their paymasters.
Western philosophy is absolutely dripping with revolutionary, abolitionist, and outright communist/anarchist sentiments. You simply aren't allowed to distribute it anywhere on a high school campus.
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Read a recent poll that said 63% of U.S. adults believe that extreme wealth is not a moral issue. Only 18% think it's morally wrong. Sad. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/19/appendix-detailed-tables-us-morality/
holy shit. how much soft power do billionaires have??
I think the common mistake is projecting our own thoughts onto a hypothetical. They try to put themselves in that situation, "if I had this much money I would do all these things" but the truth is that to be in that position there is a fundamental lack of humanity required and it's not easy to just disregard that.
It's a mental health issue. They have OCD that manifests itself as financial hoarding.
If they had a million cats, we wouldn't keep calling them great cat owners, and give them more cats until they had a billion cats. We would recognize that that many cats is bad for the community, remove the cats from their care, and get them help for their mental illness.
So let's take away the money that is the focus of their OCD, and put them into mental hospitals until their brains are wired properly.
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Because it’s easier to question the desperate than the powerful… flips the whole perspective when you think about it.
Typically, when you are "stealing bread", the implication is that you're taking it from someone equally needy. Capitalist propaganda loves to frame the theft of bread as an attack on low-wage grocery store workers, middle-income truckers and assistant managers, and impoverished agricultural workers.
You never see "stealing bread" framed against the backdrop of a garbage dumpster with a lock on it, to prevent people from taking food that's been thrown in the trash.
Is it ethical to make enough food to feed everyone but then throw it away just because of capitalism?
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The actual answer is that in western culture, it's generally taken as a given that stealing is wrong. It's in the 10 commandments.
"Hoarding" doesn't hold the same position in western mythos.
Applying pressure to an assumed moral certainty (thou shalt not steal) is fundamentally interesting. Applying pressure to a position where people don't hold culturally ethical baggage (hoarding) is much less so.
Bible does state quite clearly that rich people don't go to heaven. Mark 10:25 which is cleverly ignored by most people.
Also greed is one of seven deadly sins, althougj deadly sins are not a biblical thing but invented few hundred years after by early christians.
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Because the people that need the second lesson don't concern themselves with ethics courses.
Because the people who create those ethics "tests" are not serving you, but are serving the subset of society that causes the second situation.
The reason is because these questions are often aimed at dirt poor people, not at the rich. The rich are, despite being rich, often the single most stingy, thieving bunch in existence. If you leave a bowl of candy for everyone to take from, a few might take more than their share... but the rich will want to grab massive handfuls.
The rich will take the bowl, candy and all.
Then complain about the quality of the candy. And the bowl.
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MBAs
This actually highlights an important distinction in meta ethics (ethics about how to determine ethics). There is a divide amongst philosophers of what makes sense in pure analytical logic, and what makes sense in contextual reasoning. This divide is also shown to come up in "continental" vs "English speaking" philosophies. The two approach how to examine not just ethics, but truth overall in very different ways. I personally am of the belief that there needs to be an integration of these two in order for ethics to properly work, but to summarize this already too long Lemmy comment into one idea: fuck hoarding value of any kind.
Because in our (western) society, boldness and greed are universally honored to the point that corporations are generally seen as a means to enrich their owner rather than society as a whole. If you can afford it, and it's not explicitly outlawed, it's ethically right.
Is it ethical to hoard land when families would willingly farm that land to grow food for themselves? Same question with housing - I am capable of building a small structure to live in perfectly happily but its illegal. Not a builder so the best I could do would likely just be a bit better than van living, but I could do it if it wasn't illegal.
Systematically answering "Is hoarding bread unethical" with "No" should result in the other questions being irrelevant.
Bread should be free. We already have enough for everyone. No one has to starve anymore, scarcity is a LIE.
Because ethics don't exist as far as the ones hoarding bread in this scenario are concerned.
And because you following ethics is directly beneficial for them. As long as you act 'ethically', they remain at the top and nothing can be done about it.
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