Is it ethical to make enough food to feed everyone but then throw it away just because of capitalism?
…and then criminalizing the act of recovering said thrown away food and in some countries poison it?
Because one of these has a clear answer
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
This is the argument I have issue with. The truth is that the hypothetical isn’t grounded in reality.
Hypothetically, if one stole from another within the same class out of necessity, it’s impossible for any person to assign or deny the morality of the act.
The reality is there exists such an abundance of material needs, so much so that we have landfills for when we overproduce material needs that are not profitable. The hypothetical serves to divide the poor.
That is reality when you look at the entire earth, but seen from an individuals point that hardly matters. You may also just replace bread with a resource that is actually scarce.
On the other hand, us debating this topic at all proves my original point, nobody felt like debating the other question at all.
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.
He could have helped more people had he lived, no?
Unclear, but his community decided together that they would divvy food up as they did, then he followed that. If I were dividing food in that sort of scenario, I’d probably give more to soldiers, doctors, and young people over bakers, because they represent very difficult to transfer skills (at least during a siege) and your city’s future.
Anyone who decided on their own that they need nourishment more than the community would not be someone I want as a baker going forward though, so he wouldn’t have been able to help people with it anyway.
When you phrase it like that, it’s lik stealing is the only way to feed your family. If that is the case, sure stealing is obviously justified. If there are other options to feed you family, it becomes a more complicated dilemma.
It probably depends on what these other options are, who you’re stealing from, etc.
this is just the commies having “being an individual” problems again
always need a strong man to take over
Because ethics questions love focusing on individual choices, not the systems causing the problem in the first place.
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.
And the candy will rot in their mansion as they peddle far-right conspiracy theories on Twitter.
I saw some Scrooge McDuck cartoons from the 60s that had him talk about money in a realistic way. Saying that a billion dollars is an unfathomable number, and how money must be constantly circulating otherwise problems will happen.
Even a duck tales cartoon had Scrooge lose his entire fortune so he decided to start from scratch again… And then realized that the world he was able to start his fortune in is no longer there and he cannot succeed again even if he did exactly what he did prior.
On top of that, the existence of his Lucky Dime and how his luck changes dramatically if he loses it is also an acknowledgement of the importance of luck.
That is because Scrooge wasn’t written bij actual rich people. So of course he knows nuance.
Scrooge is, if you want to be really, really picky about it, a racist stereotype. Why is Scrooge even Scottish? Because the Scots have long been stereotyped as stingy and thrifty and always looking for a cheaper option or deal. If you watch older media you will inevitably run into that stereotype. The first proto-Scrooge was in a 1943 Donald Duck cartoon about making sure you had enough money to pay your taxes for the war effort. Basically it was a fight between the ‘spendthrift’ and the ‘thrift’ to either blow his cash away or use it responsibly. He was the thrift in that film.
Also canonically, Scrooge is dead. He’s been dead since the 1960s. He lived to the age of 100, born in the 1860s and died in the 1960s.
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.
Where did you study philosophy?
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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I get what you’re saying, but America has real problems with cheap, highly processed foods which are addictive in nature. If you’re low income you’re likely to be eating low nutrition foods packed with sugar.
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.
I think you have a lot of beliefs about the first that are not stated. There are many many ways to frame the first in which you would not so easily answer yes. There are very few ways to frame the second in which it’s ethical.
There are very few ways to frame the second in which it’s ethical.
yeah, that’s the point of the post. it’s clearly unethical, and yet, capitalism continues.
The second has nothing to do with capitalism. They are ethical questions that have nothing to do with political systems or governments. They’re meant to have you think about things in a deeper manner. There’s a lot less to think about with the second than the first and thus doesn’t really matter in an educational setting.
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.
When it’s phrased as wealth inequality, things are usually a little different but yeah, a ton of that survey is depressing. I mean, gambling is lower than shit like pornography… (Although again, context could change that, too, I suppose.)
“But until the sage is dead, great thieves will never cease to appear, and if you pile on more sages in hopes of bringing the world to order, you will only be piling up more profit for Robber Chih. Fashion pecks and bushels for people to measure by and they will steal by peck and bushel.5 Fashion scales and balances for people to weigh by and they will steal by scale and balance. Fashion tallies and seals to insure trustworthiness and people will steal with tallies and seals. Fashion benevolence and righteousness to reform people and they will steal with benevolence and righteousness. How do I know this is so? He who steals a belt buckle pays with his life; he who steals a state gets to be a feudal lord-and we all know that benevolence and righteousness are to be found at the gates of the feudal lords. Is this not a case of stealing benevolence and righteousness and the wisdom of the sages?” Chapter 10 of Zhuangzi (Stolen Chests), Burton Watson translation.
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.
I don’t mind stealing bread from the mouths of decadents.
I don’t know why but TIL Vedder was the singer for Temple. Can’t believe it took me that long to realize.
my first read I thought you meant STP and I was like ??? how do u make that mistake??
actually it’s a really cool story, Chris Cornell is the vocalist in Temple but he was struggling to hit the low notes on that song and Eddie was in the studio waiting to practice with Pearl jam and just stepped up and started singing that part, next time he was around Chris asked him to record it.
was Eddie’s first time on any record apparently! i didn’t know that part until today
I’ve always loved the way Chris explains it, “When we started rehearsing the songs, I had pulled out “Hunger Strike” and I had this feeling it was just kind of gonna be filler, it didn’t feel like a real song. Eddie was sitting there kind of waiting for a (Mookie Blaylock) rehearsal and I was singing parts, and he kind of humbly—but with some balls—walked up to the mic and started singing the low parts for me because he saw it was kind of hard. We got through a couple choruses of him doing that and suddenly the light bulb came on in my head, this guy’s voice is amazing for these low parts. History wrote itself after that, that became the single.”
Now you’re confusing me? STP’s singer was Weiland, Cornell was Soundgarden… Temple of the Dog was full of future Pearl Jam members.
I always wonder how true some of these stories are from the entertainment industry. They sound good.
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.
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.
I always thought of hoarding as a way of stealing from everyone
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.
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.
