Alias wrote: ↑October 28th, 2020, 1:26 amWell... sorta. At the same time, momma is bringing home pens, Scotch tape and yellow pads from work and poppa's fudging his peripheral income on the tax return and both are telling you to let baby bro have the cookie he filched off your plate.... so... it's bad, but maybe not always and maybe not all that bad....Marvin_Edwards wrote: ↑October 27th, 2020, 8:25 am We don't see a lot of arguments that create or modify moral rules. Most rules are simply handed down to us by others. For example, we are taught that "stealing is bad" and we are scolded or we are told of others being punished for stealing, and we acquire that "feeling of badness" about the behavior of stealing.
So, the loss of the victim's property (harpoon, hide scraper, chili, or slingshot) harmed him. The harm made him angry, and the anger motivated him to "thump" the guy who stole their property, to teach him not to do it again. The one-on-one punishment was creating discord in the tribe, so the chief and elders stepped in to make a rule against stealing.Alias wrote: ↑October 28th, 2020, 1:26 amThey were very bright people, but their social organization was a lot simpler than ours. You took another guy's harpoon without permission, he'd thump you. ("This is not good," you thought.) A couple of young warriors got into a tussle over ownership of a really good spear, each accusing the other of taking it without asking. ("This is not good," thought the chief; "They'll get to thumping each other and their friends will take sides and there will be discord in the tribe.") So the next time somebody wanted somebody else's hide scraper, they snuck up quietly and took it with nobody noticing and the concept of theft came into the human consciousness (birds and rodents had been familiar with it for millions of years) and everybody from grandmothers in need of a chili for their stew to little boys wanting a better slingshot started sneaking around, abstracting other people's stuff and everybody was running around, yelling insults at one another and pulling hair. So, the chief called a council of the elders and they made A Very Solemn Declaration: From now on, anybody caught stealing anything at all will be banished for two moons. (Hell, all alone out there in the wilderness for two moons, a person could die!) (Well, okay, the elders amended, not old people and little kids - they can do their penance time on the edge of the camp and their family can bring them food. But no affection!!)But, have we considered what may have gone through the heads of our earliest ancestors who first had to decide whether stealing was a good or bad thing?
Armed robbery indeed. Or perhaps war. And, anything's fair in war, or it used to be until the Geneva Conventions.Alias wrote: ↑October 28th, 2020, 1:26 amThat's not theft; that's armed robbery. Vikings probably would have been ashamed to sneak around taking things without being seen; they came directly at their prey with weapons. And they killed a lot of the people who objected, so it's robbery and murder. And that's never wrong, as long as you're doing it to another tribe/ nation/ ideology.We know, for example, that tribes like the Vikings routinely raided other towns to acquire the things they needed.
I think that theft and murder are considered a crime pretty much everywhere. The place where I think theft might not be a crime would be a commune, where property is held in common. But I don't know whether that would include personal items.Alias wrote: ↑October 28th, 2020, 1:26 amNo moral rule is universal. No definition of a crime/ sin/ transgression / wrongdoing is universal.So, the notion that stealing is universally wrong was not the accepted moral rule for everyone.
All morality is circumstantial and provisional and all law is unequally applied.
I think that morality would universally object to any unnecessary harm deliberately inflicted by one person on another. But, interpreting and applying this dictum is what will vary from society to society. Circumcision, for example, would be considered a necessary harm by Jewish sects.
I suspect that most societies have plenty of bad laws on the books. But, the question is, how do we tell a bad law from a good law? Did you have any particular example of a bad law in mind? What makes it bad and what would you replace it with?