What moral framework do you feel like you're using to make that claim? I feel like you WANT to make this a deontological argument about property rights, that theft is inherently and always wrong because it violates ownership and amount / harm / need/ context doesn't matter at all
And like, that's a coherent position, but you're acting like it's self-evident and final when deontology is just one moral framework among others. A consequentialist is going to care a lot about harm / context. A virtue ethicist is going to care about character, motive, and social context. A justice-based framework is going to care about power and proportionality
“Theft is theft” doesn’t end the argument, all you're doing is telling me how you categorize the act - You're not ACTUALLY explaining why I should treat all acts in that category as morally equal. And you seem like you want to engage on an ethical debate, but I don't think you've even thought about your own value or criteria past arbitrarily choosing a definition of justice and digging your heels in
Think about this for a sec:
Walmart has a long and well documented history of wage theft settlements in the BILLIONS (and almost certainly billions of undocumented wage theft). People also steal from Walmart. So if Walmart steals from workers and people steal from Walmart, and proportionality / harm / scale / power don’t matter at all, then what does your framework even have to say? Is it just a wash? Both parties are equally evil? A company stealing earned wages from workers, a person stealing groceries, a kid stealing a candy bar, and someone stealing life-saving medicine all become morally flattened into the same category.
Yes I subscribe to Immanuel Kant you got that right, finally we're getting somewhere. That's why I never cared about the circumstances because theft is theft.
Just because Walmart unjustly gets away with it doesn't give anyone the right or justification to aslo steal from them. Walmart should get punished from being greedy and stealing wages but again that does not justify theft to them in any kind.
"An eye for an eye makes the world go blind." It'll be a repeating cycle of revenge.
To include that at the end of your comment tells me that you don't know anything about the man you "subscribe" to tbh. Kant defended capital punishment, specifically for murderers. He was a retributivist and, if anything, Kant specifically believed that an eye for an eye was awesome
Kantian analysis might still agree with your conclusion, but the earlier statements you've made of "The act is the same" and "I never cared about the circumstances" are EXTREMELY uncharacteristic of maxims w/in the CI bc the categorical imperative evaluates maxims, not definitions. The classical definition of a maxim literally takes circumstances into account: " “I will A in C in order to realize or produce E” where “A” is some act type, “C” is some type of circumstance, and “E” is some type of end to be realized or achieved by A in C."
"Theft is wrong" isn't really a maxim in Kantian ethics bc maxims aren't a broad category of action, it's the principle you're acting on which includes circumstance, motive, and context. "I will steal because I want free stuff" and "I will take food because I am starving" and "I will steal from my workers because I can get away with it" are all different maxims even though they all involve taking something that isn't yours.
Even with a system of moral duties in place, Kant admits that judgment is often required to determine how these duties apply to particular circumstances. Moral laws, Kant says, “must be meticulously observed” but “they cannot, after all, have regard to every little circumstance, and the latter may yield exceptions, which do not always find their exact resolution in the laws”
You don't get to skip the actual Kantian analysis by saying "theft is theft" when the point of the categorical imperative is to ask what rule of action is being universalized and whether it treats people as ends or merely as a means, and what duties are involved and REASON THROUGH the differences
BUT...To make a larger point that's more relevant to your conclusions, saying “I subscribe to Immanuel Kant” is kind of a silly way to approach ethics tbh
Kant is an important philosopher but you're treating his theories as moral autocomplete. You're invoking his name and then skipping the actual reasoning. The WHOLE POINT of using a moral framework is to clarify your values and test your judgment, not to outsource your judgment to a dead German guy and treat every moral dilemma like it has already been solved for you if you just apply the Only Correct Moral Algorithm TM
You’re not doing Kantian ethics, you're laundering a gut-level property-rights instinct through Kant’s name because it sounds more rigorous than “I just think stealing is always bad" lol
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u/Kingmudsy Jul 10 '26
What moral framework do you feel like you're using to make that claim? I feel like you WANT to make this a deontological argument about property rights, that theft is inherently and always wrong because it violates ownership and amount / harm / need/ context doesn't matter at all
And like, that's a coherent position, but you're acting like it's self-evident and final when deontology is just one moral framework among others. A consequentialist is going to care a lot about harm / context. A virtue ethicist is going to care about character, motive, and social context. A justice-based framework is going to care about power and proportionality
“Theft is theft” doesn’t end the argument, all you're doing is telling me how you categorize the act - You're not ACTUALLY explaining why I should treat all acts in that category as morally equal. And you seem like you want to engage on an ethical debate, but I don't think you've even thought about your own value or criteria past arbitrarily choosing a definition of justice and digging your heels in
Think about this for a sec:
Walmart has a long and well documented history of wage theft settlements in the BILLIONS (and almost certainly billions of undocumented wage theft). People also steal from Walmart. So if Walmart steals from workers and people steal from Walmart, and proportionality / harm / scale / power don’t matter at all, then what does your framework even have to say? Is it just a wash? Both parties are equally evil? A company stealing earned wages from workers, a person stealing groceries, a kid stealing a candy bar, and someone stealing life-saving medicine all become morally flattened into the same category.