Topics Ethics

Question You are an amazing website! I have told many people about you guys. We greatly appreciate your kind services. I feel smarter and like I have learned something after having visited your site. Here's a hard question. I heard it on a television called the Office. Can you steal food in order to feed your starving family? If so, why? I know, you want your family to survive. But still, stealing is a crime. Would you even murder to feed your family? Where do we draw the line? Who determines? The best philosophers? Doesn't G-d decide because he made us and the world? Many Thanks!

Accepted:
November 26, 2010

Comments

Thank you for your kind words about this site! Your question is very difficult. To pick up your last suggestion: if there is an all good Creator who sustains the cosmos, and this G-d commands that the hungry be fed, then there would be an obligation for those with surplus food to give to those in famine. Under these circumstances, taking food from those with surplus would involve compelling them to do (or let happen) what was their obligation. This line of reasoning will only take us so far, however, not only due to doubts about God's existence and commands (doubts I do not share, by the way, but there is doubt) but because nowhere in the Hebrew Bible, Christian new Testament or Qur'an is there what appears to be a divinely revealed precept that one may kill to get food. As for the suggestion that it may be "the best philosophers" who decide what is right, I am afraid there is some disagreement.

Some philosophers argue for stringent distributive justice and egalitarianism: there should be (as much as possible) a fair (perhaps even equal) distribution of goods within a society. Others argue for the permissibility of inequality so long as there is some insurance that the worst off do not fall below a welfare level in keeping with human dignity and respect. Someone who developed an amazing system of justice that addresses the issue of distribution of goods is John Rawls. You might find his classic work, A Theory of Justice, fascinating.

Back to your question about stealing and killing: the question winds up juxtaposing the right to property and the right to life. While individuals may face a very real practical dilemma on this matter, it may be that collectively we can gain greater clarity. I suggest that the best philosophers may disagree about a great deal, but I think few would disagree that we should work for a society in which no individual faces the dilemma of deciding between killing and feeding her or his family.