Re: Voir Dire
To all of those who think you cannot justify walking into that playboys house and stealing money when you are not starving...consider what you are doing when you download a movie/mp3/comptuer software that you otherwise would have bought.
David,
The lines drawn for these moral arguments shift with what the consensus is for needs and desires. I think most of us, being good children of the enlightenment, feel as though certain freedoms and liberties are due to every person born. The most basic liberty of course, is being allowed to live. In your examples, the stealer is somebody trying to provide for helpless children, who through no fault of their own, find it nessesary for stealing to occur for them to survive. So the answers given are really in a response to the priorities that we see between liberties. We feel as though we can sacrifice the freedom to have basic comforts and desires (excess money or whatever) to allow for survival of the innocent. Im sure the answers might change a little bit if it was a degenerate gambler who had to steal bread because he keeps losing his quarters at the local casino.
making any arguement to him as a person only offers emotional responces to what should be logical moral questions. we should consider this as a case of right or wrong (or whatever degrees of both this might be) and leave the humanistic appeal out of it.
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