Ill-gotten gains

[Aimless]

Is it morally correct to knowingly benefit from strongly immoral actions committed by others? Eg. buying stolen goods for cheap to make your life awesome (putting aside the question of legality).


EDIT

follow-up questions:

In your view, what responsibility do you have to avoid benefiting from the immoral actions of other people? Eg. what moral responsibility do you have to make sure you don't buy stolen goods for cheap. If the example of theft is problematic you're free to substitute any other suitable action.

Fuzzy brings up an interesting point: the availability of other choices, and the costs associated with them.

There is moral responsibility there but it there's nothing like a hard answer. It depends on the circumstances. What choices are available to you in a given situation and how much effort particular options are.

Do choices that are morally right automatically trump the immoral choice, rendering that immoral choice unacceptable by default? Your post leads me to believe that you, at least, don't necessarily think so. How significant must the effort/cost associated with the right option be in order for us to prefer the wrong option?

Eg. pirating music or software, or stealing out of desperation to feed your family after becoming unemployed, or robbing a bank to get money for your brother's cancer-treatment.

[wiggin]

Uhm, no?

[Momo]

Is it morally correct to knowingly benefit from strongly immoral actions committed by others? Eg. buying stolen goods for cheap to make your life awesome (putting aside the question of legality).

Bad example because you mixed 'illegal' up with 'immoral'.

The answer to your question can be 'yes'. For example, did I knowingly benefit from the apartheid regime? Yes: I learned powerful lessons about right and wrong and experienced a painful (yet positive) transformative process, for which I'm now grateful.

Quit mixing up legislation and morality!

[Nessus]

Is it morally correct to knowingly benefit from strongly immoral actions committed by others? Eg. buying stolen goods for cheap to make your life awesome (putting aside the question of legality).

At this stage, you have gotten yours, so any moral questions may safely be answered with "fuck you". So yes, yes it is.

[Momo]

What really irritates me is that he takes an illegal premise and then says 'but pretend its not illegal - is it ok to do it?'

What type of question is that? It tries to both validate the absolute rule of law and simultaneously disregard it.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Bad example because you mixed 'illegal' up with 'immoral'.

Don't think he did. I think the example he gave he labelled stealing goods as immoral, not illegal (it is illegal, but that's beside the point).

I agree with the answer you give. The thing that is missing from the question, but is implied by the example given (so I'm far from sure that's what Minx meant to aim at) is that by your own actions you endorse the immoral action in some way.

[Timbuk2]

Uhm, no?

[Aimless]

So far we've mostly gotten replies from the left end of the forum political spectrum, I'd love to see a few responses from the centre, the right and the... you know, the other guys.

[Wraith]

Uhm, no?

[wiggin]

One quick clarification: I think the issue here mostly is the 'knowingly' clause in your question. There are plenty of things we benefit passively from that are far from ideal or moral, but for the most part we're oblivious. But knowing about something rather than an ex post facto realization? I don't see why it would be right.

There's obviously some room also in your definition of 'benefit'. I define it rather narrowly - material benefit of some sort (money, power, whatever). I suppose one could argue that we benefit from every situation since everything is a learning experience (a la apartheid), but that makes the question a moot point since we don't end up having much of a choice about benefiting one way or another.

[Aimless]

One quick clarification: I think the issue here mostly is the 'knowingly' clause in your question. There are plenty of things we benefit passively from that are far from ideal or moral, but for the most part we're oblivious. But knowing about something rather than an ex post facto realization? I don't see why it would be right.

There's obviously some room also in your definition of 'benefit'. I define it rather narrowly - material benefit of some sort (money, power, whatever). I suppose one could argue that we benefit from every situation since everything is a learning experience (a la apartheid), but that makes the question a moot point since we don't end up having much of a choice about benefiting one way or another.

I should have clarified that I was indeed mostly thinking of material gains, and to "knowingly" you may also add "actively"







In anticipation of further responses I'd like to pose a follow-up question:

In your view, what responsibility do you have to not benefit from the immoral actions of other people? Eg. what responsibility do you have to make sure you don't buy stolen goods for cheap. If the example of theft is problematic you're free to substitute any other suitable action.

[wiggin]

I think there's a limit. One should carry out reasonable due diligence (for example, looking up the reputation of a company you're dealing with) but that's about it. Most people can figure out fishy deals on their own; at some point, though, you just have to trust that people are on the up-and-up.

[LittleFuzzy]

Is it morally correct to knowingly benefit from strongly immoral actions committed by others? Eg. buying stolen goods for cheap to make your life awesome (putting aside the question of legality).

It is, at best, morally ambiguous. Even if you didn't have any reasonable alternatives you should probably feel somewhat guilty about those benefits. And I'll add in a poke at Momo and say that applies even to the wisdom he gained from seeing/experiencing apartheid.

In your view, what responsibility do you have to avoid benefiting from the immoral actions of other people? Eg. what moral responsibility do you have to make sure you don't buy stolen goods for cheap. If the example of theft is problematic you're free to substitute any other suitable action.

There is moral responsibility there but it there's nothing like a hard answer. It depends on the circumstances. What choices are available to you in a given situation and how much effort particular options are. With stolen goods you could limit yourself to never buying things without a strictly-traced provenance so you know it's legitimate but that's probably excessive. You probably aren't being irresponsible with an application of common sense and mostly assuming uninimical intentions on the part of people you buy goods from unless and until something causes you to be suspicious. Maybe prefer thrift stores to pawnshops for budget purchases

[Aimless]

Hmm you bring up an important aspect I hadn't considered: the availability of other choices, and the costs associated with them. Do choices that are morally right automatically trump the immoral choice, rendering that immoral choice unacceptable by default? Your post leads me to believe that you, at least, don't necessarily think so. How significant must the effort/cost associated with the right option be in order for us to prefer the wrong option?

Eg. pirating music or software, or stealing out of desperation to feed your family after becoming unemployed, or robbing a bank to get money for your brother's cancer-treatment.

I am not asking you to commit to any concrete answers or asking you defend any particular position, but your response raises a couple of important point and I think I shall make these questions the next line of follow-up questions

[wiggin]

Obviously if you don't have a choice, you don't have a choice (buying stolen food or starving is hardly a choice - though I would hope that people would still refuse if the food was stolen from other starving individuals). But if there are viable alternatives? There's no question IMO.

[Nessus]

(buying stolen food or starving is hardly a choice - though I would hope that people would still refuse if the food was stolen from other starving individuals).

I recently read a good book, Mao's Great Famine, dealing with (surprise!) The Great Leap forward. They touch on this issue; everyone who managed to save themselves doomed others, as the problem was so all-encompassing in their society. How far does your hope go?

[wiggin]

I can't say what I would do in a similar terrible situation. It's very challenging to put oneself in that position. There are multiple accounts from various awful situations - forced labor camps in the USSR, famines in Ukraine and China, death camps in the Holocaust, etc. Some people refused to doom others for their own survival; others didn't. I can't really judge in that position, but I do think that someone with strong moral fiber would question whether their survival is fundamentally more important than another's.

[Nessus]

A viewpoint Levi brings up in most of his works. Though as a nit-pick, the people in the death camps didn't have to worry about food that much (except during transit) as they were killed hours (or minutes) after arrival, it's the concentration camps where they slowly starved people to death.

[Aimless]

In the example you bring up, the outcomes are symmetrical: either I die, or I steal your food and live, in which case you die.

I can see how, in a situation like that, one might fall on either side of the fence.

Does it matter if the outcomes are less symmetrical?

[Nessus]

I think it does, which is kind of why Ender's statement piqued my interest.

[wiggin]

Yes. If it's a question of me dying vs. someone having to make another trip to the grocery store, I'm not particularly concerned about the moral implications. Obviously theft is still wrong, but absent other alternatives I'd buy stolen goods in such a situation.

[Ominous Gamer]

I recently read a good book, Mao's Great Famine, dealing with (surprise!) The Great Leap forward. They touch on this issue; everyone who managed to save themselves doomed others, as the problem was so all-encompassing in their society. How far does your hope go?

I once read a nazi prisoner book because of your suggestion, and the author spent a good deal of time recalling when he found a pipe that still had a good bit of water in it. How he shared it with his work partner, but didn't share it with others that were within close range. For all the words and time he spent explaining the experience and if what he was doing was moral, he came down to what basically amounted to a "fuck it, its either I survive and they don't, or we all draw out the suffering." He only shared with his work partner because he had to.


Can't recall the title or the author.

[Nessus]

It's Levi, but I'm not 100% which book that story is in. Levi underlines what it means to be a survivor, that there is a certain moral implication.

[LittleFuzzy]

Do choices that are morally right automatically trump the immoral choice, rendering that immoral choice unacceptable by default?

They do so on purely a moral dimension but in reality things are never one-dimensional.

Your post leads me to believe that you, at least, don't necessarily think so. How significant must the effort/cost associated with the right option be in order for us to prefer the wrong option?

Well, I believe that we're psychologically biased to view acts of commission as stronger than acts of omission. So accepting someone else's immoral act is easier than directly engaging in one yourself. The depth of the wrong done to someone else is presumably some sort of multiplier, and that's not just an aspect of what was done but who it was done too. We're programmed even at a societal level by evolution to regard children as more unacceptable targets of harm. As Wiggin referenced earlier we can mostly accept selecting the least bad option from a list of bad options even if it's still dissatisfying on an emotional level.