Week 3: The Five-finger Discount

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon famously asserted that property is theft.

Yes, well: theft is theft, too.

By any rational moral standard, it's just impossible to qualify the act of stealing; it's always the same offence, regardless of who does it to whom, or for what reason. In that respect at least, the law is (mostly) consistent with common sense.¹

However, it's certainly possible to make that case that some forms of theft are more morally justifiable than others. Shoplifting, for example, is often seen (or at least rationalised) as the action of an individual against a faceless, bastard-capitalist edifice² which is only going to rip off its consumer-victims in any case...

Ah done stoled from the Wal-Mart.

... and this is no doubt true enough in some cases. But it's still stealing, no matter how economically principled those cases might be; and in a society in which the primacy of wealth and possessions is enshrined in law, there's no use in pretending that it's possible to make a moral exception for shoplifters.

I'll admit that I'm far from squeaky-clean in this regard. When I lived in New York, between jobs, there was more than one occasion when I literally could not afford enough to eat (and as a, shall I say, less-than-fully-documented resident, there weren't many options for me in terms of social security, either). I can recall at least three occasions on which I pilfered basic food essentials from supermarkets-- but only what I absolutely needed, and never when I could afford to buy it, no matter how much I'd have liked to save the money. And it's definitely never occurred to me that I might want to steal something just because I know, from those experiences, that I can quite easily get away with it; I might have accepted the necessity of shoplifting at the time, but I can't pretend that I ever felt particularly good about it afterwards. I guess I just don't possess the sense of monstrous self-entitlement that seems to be the main prerequisite for forming a recreational shoplifting habit.


¹ Incidentally, this article makes the claim that in other European countries, shoplifting is generally treated as a technical offence rather than a serious crime. I haven't been able to find any concrete legal evidence for that comparison, however, so it may well be more of a rhetorical flourish. The article is highly entertaining on any number of levels, though, so you should read it anyway.

² Yes: the Yomango website is in Spanish; this is why y'all should've done a language module last semester. Yomango is a kind of subcultural clique/movement whose members specifically promote shoplifting as a means of subverting and/or recovering from consumer culture. As yet, its public presence doesn't seem to have diffused from southern Spain.