Dec. 28, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:59
The Ethics of Starving
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All right, everybody, Stefan Molly from Free Domain.
Welcome to the first post-Christmas show 2025.
Hey, Steph, my question is on necessary evil.
Is there such a thing?
My thoughts are, evil is the unwanted use of force against you.
But say you push someone out of the way from getting hit by a car, that is preferable to getting hit by the car, even though unwanted force is used.
Actually, it's kind of interesting.
There was a sort of AI video that was floating around, I guess, usual suspect sewing division among the sexes of the West.
And it was the sort of ostensible story was a guy did just that, right?
The story was that he pushed a woman out of the way of an oncoming car, and she got mad and she sued him and all this kind of stuff, right?
Now, I think there's some other stories that have been along those lines, but this one in particular was a sort of AI lie, just standard fifth generation warfare stuff.
And it's a very interesting question.
This goes way back to sort of the ethics of emergencies.
I wrote an article like almost 20 years ago about the issue.
Oh, if you care so much about property rights, then if someone is hanging off a flagpole, they fell off a roof, they're hanging off a flagpole right outside your window where they allowed to kick it in and climb into your house and save themselves from falling.
And if you say yes, then clearly human life is more important than property rights.
Therefore, you can violate property rights to save human life, therefore welfare state.
Or another example is your wife is dying of a horrible disease and a doctor has a cure, but he will only sell it to you for $100,000 and you don't have $100,000.
Are you allowed to steal the medicine from him and save your wife?
And of course, if you say, no, you're not allowed to save your wife, then you look like a crazy person who doesn't understand human motives and an ideologue who puts abstract ideas about actual human life.
And of course, if you say yes, you are allowed to steal the medicine from the doctor who won't give it to you for less than $100,000.
And then, of course, well, then access to health care and medicine is more important than property rights.
And therefore, socialized medicine is the way to go and so on, right?
So these are, or, you know, obviously a starving guy is going to die if he doesn't steal a piece of bread from the bakers.
Is he allowed to steal the piece of bread?
Or is he supposed to starve to death?
And these are sophist tricks, of course, right?
These are sophist tricks because they set up these situations.
I mean, ridiculously implausible or whatever, but that's fine.
I mean, rights are supposed to be not inductive, but deductive reasoning.
So they're supposed to be absolute.
And so if you can set up a situation where people violate property rights in ways that we would all pretty much understand and sympathize with, and therefore there's no such thing as property rights.
So this idea that there are necessary evils is very tempting.
Now, to take sort of a common example, and I've talked about a lot of these before, but not in this sort of concentrated way.
So I hope this will be helpful.
So let's take the guy whose wife is dying.
There's a medicine that the pharmacist or the doctor will only sell him for $100,000.
He can't afford it.
Is he supposed to just watch his wife die?
Well, of course, one foundational question is, why does the medicine exist in the first place?
Why does the medicine exist in the first place?
Well, the medicine exists in the first place on the condition that it's not going to get stolen.
Like nobody would bother creating a medicine if everybody could just steal it, right?
I mean, you wouldn't bother even putting together a convenience store.
if everyone in need could just come and take and steal everything from the convenience store, right?
That wouldn't make much sense at all.
So one of the arguments against stealing the medicine to save your wife is that, okay, fine.
So if the principle is that if you need a medicine that you cannot afford, you can steal it, then the consequence is that no new medicines will really be developed.
And so you're actually costing far more lives than you're saving.
So if you are costing far more lives than you're saving, the argument of saving lives doesn't apply.
So let's say that your wife is dying of an illness of which a thousand people a year die, right?
There's a thousand people a year die three a day or whatever, right?
A thousand people a year die of this illness.
Okay.
So then the medicine, for whatever reason, right, could have been ridiculously lengthy to develop.
It could be that there's a lot of liability.
It could be that the ingredients are ferociously expensive.
It could be any number of things.
Now, somebody, of course, who develops a medicine wants that medicine to be bought, wants it to be for sale, and will try to make it in such a way that you can buy it and so on.
But let's say you're some poor guy, your wife's dying, and so you steal the medicine, and then this is a general principle, not an individual instance.
So this is a general principle that people in need can take medicines without recompense, right?
They can just go and steal medicines because their wives are sick and they don't have the money.
Okay.
So what that means is that no new medicines will really be developed.
Again, we're talking about individuals, not some sort of government program.
So if you say, well, you can justly steal medicine if your wife is dying and you can't afford the medicine, all that means is that no new medicines will be developed.
And of course, if somebody develops a medicine and the cheapest they can sell it for is $100,000, then they did that on the assumption that people wouldn't just steal it from them.
So the medicine only exists because of property rights.
So if you violate property rights, then what will happen is no new medicines will be developed.
And if the doctor knew in advance that his medicine was going to just be taken by people who were in need, he never would have developed it.
And therefore, you are not saving this one person's life.
You are costing a thousand people their lives every year, right?
So it's always the IQ test, right?
Always, always, always the IQ test or the G test, general intelligence test is the visible benefits versus the hidden costs.
And, you know, the one woman whose life is saved because the medicine is stolen is an obvious visible benefit.
The hidden costs, of course, as you understand, right?
The hidden costs are the tens or hundreds of thousands of people who will die because no new medicines are being developed because all the new medicines are just being stolen by people who can't afford them.
So nobody's going to bother investing in new medicines, right?
You're just going to have them stolen.
And let's say that, I mean, for a medicine to cost $100,000, it must have cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, right?
To test and so on to market.
And so nobody is going to bother investing $100 million or more in developing a medicine if poor people are just going to steal it.
And therefore, you are not saving one life.
You are costing tens or hundreds of thousands of lives.
So all of this stuff is just like a, it's a test for low IQ.
Like the people who are just mysteriously showing up on X for me, which is all the people saying that, you know, the billionaires are stealing from you, as opposed to the government who takes your money by force and can literally have the next generation or even the last generation born a million or two million or three million dollars in debt because of national debts and unfunded liabilities.
I mean, no millionaire can do that.
The government can print money and devalue the currency.
Millionaires cannot print their own currency.
Billionaires cannot print their own currency and so on, right?
So it's just an IQ.
It's just an IQ test.
Can you tell the difference between somebody who's chosen through the free market and somebody's sort of like saying hot girls are stealing, like hot, smart, funny girls are stealing the husbands of dumb, ugly women?
Well, no, they're not really in the same ballpark.
They're not really, right?
And of course, but this is a zero-sum game to a large degree.
And economics is not a zero-sum game, right?
This is another IQ test: if someone has more, does that mean automatically that someone else has less?
Right?
That's just an IQ test.
If you think that billionaires have more because poor people have less, then you don't understand economics.
If you think that you just save someone's life by allowing poor people to steal medicine, you just save someone's life, and there's no cost, no downside, no negatives, that's an IQ test.
So there was kind of a debate, more of a throwing your hands in the air between Malcolm, the fellow I debated a couple of weeks ago on spanking, between Malcolm and some woke reporter.
And the woke reporter was saying that there's no genetic differences at all between ethnicities or races or whatever.
And she said, well, you know, in the past, genetic differences between races has been used to create a racial hierarchy.
It's bad, Nazis, blah, blah, blah.
And therefore, the argument is false because I can imagine negative consequences to the belief or because certain beliefs have been misused in the past, then the belief is false, which is sort of like saying, well, Albert Einstein's theory of relativity was used in part to create nuclear weapons, which killed a lot of Japanese people.
And therefore, the theory of relativity is false.
It's like saying that chemistry and physics are false because chemistry and physics were used to create dynamite.
And some of that dynamite was used to blow up innocent people.
And therefore, physics and math and chemistry are all false because some people used those arguments or those truths or realities to do bad things in the past.
So it's just sort of an intelligence test.
And I'm not talking about the listener here.
It's a great question.
But it's in general.
Isolated situations with no long-term ramifications, no sort of public choice theory, is just a mark of low intelligence.
So if you say that people hanging from flagpoles or people in potentially dangerous situations can break into other people's houses, then people will pretend to be in dangerous situations just to break into other people's houses.
Oh, officer, I was being chased by a dog if you get caught breaking into someone's house.
I thought I was being chased by a dog.
A condor was swooping at me from above.
I thought I was being shadowed by a bear, right?
And then so people will just make up dangerous situations in order to break into other people's houses, right?
If you say that a poor person can steal expensive medicine, then people will simply get rid of their assets or not gather their assets in order to get access to expensive goods and services.
So if you are to say poor people can use taxis and Ubers and DoorDash for free, then people will simply either pretend to be poor, transfer their assets elsewhere, or not gather those assets in order to get access to those services for free, right?
So this is sort of the basic public choice theory.
If you say, oh, well, you know, the poor single mothers who are only 5% of the population need help from the government, so we'll help them.
And then you don't sit there and say, okay, well, if you start giving a huge amount of money to women who have children without fathers, then you're creating a massive incentive for women to have children without the father sticking around, in which case the dads will just pretend to be away or what, like you just change people's decisions, right?
Sort of public choice theory.
So the key issue with the poor guy whose wife is dying because she can't afford the medicine, well, I mean, of course, he has tons of options, right?
He can offer to pay off the cost of the medicine over a long period of time.
He can appeal to charity if he's part of a church, right?
If he's part of a church with a thousand people, then what, each one of them can offer up $100 and then he can afford the medicine.
He can offer to do free labor for the doctor.
Let's say he knows something about gardening.
I will do your gardening for 10 years if you give me the medicine.
He can offer to be a case study.
He can offer or he can get some organization to say, well, look at this really nice doctor.
He gave this medicine away to this guy just to save his wife and so on, right?
So and then be a case study in raising somebody's popularity profile in the world, which companies do all the time.
They do a lot of charity and sponsorship work in order to raise people's view of the company and make them look charitable and so on, right?
That means a win-win.
So the other question, of course, is why can the poor man not afford the rich medicine?
So what he should have, of course, is insurance, like everybody needs insurance.
And I'm talking sort of free market insurance as a whole, not government garbage-mandated whatever, right?
So why doesn't he have insurance?
Ah, well, you see, he can't afford insurance.
Okay, so then we would look back and we would say, okay, well, why can't he afford insurance, this sort of poor man, right?
So if it's in a government society, like let's say it's in the American society, well, the government has control over children for 12 years straight and educates them.
So why is he poor?
Why is he poor?
Well, in general, people are poor because the government doesn't teach them anything of any economic value.
I mean, as you see these sort of heartbreaking videos of often, it's generally young women with long nails, but it's young women who are saying, you know, this like, this is crazy.
I'm paying 13.5% on my student loan, which means I borrowed $40,000 and my loan costs are $70,000, blah, blah, blah.
This is terrible and bad and wrong and so on.
And of course, one of the reasons why this happens is because people aren't taught really anything about finance, math, math literacy, financial literacy.
They're not really taught anything about compounding interest and interest rates and variable rates and fixed rates and so on.
They're not taught any of that in school, in government schools.
So they're not born with any particular financial literacy.
And then they will go into loans that are guaranteed by the government.
Because if you were borrowing $40,000 to get a job, sorry, to get trained in a career which was very unlikely to generate any real income, then you wouldn't get that loan.
Like people won't lend you that money.
I just remember when I was in the business world trying to get loans, so loan guarantees and so on, bridge financing was tough.
And people were really, they would really go all over your business and your income and your expenses and so on and try to figure out what was going on and whether you could pay back the loan.
And mortgage companies, obviously, well, at least with mortgage companies, they can get an asset called the house, right?
So, yeah, it's all really, really tragic stuff.
So why is the guy so poor that he can't afford, even over a 20-year payment schedule at a few percentage points of interest, why can't he afford a $100,000 loan?
Or why isn't he part of any group that he can give charity to?
Or why doesn't he have health insurance?
Like these are sort of important questions.
Now, it could be, it could be, of course, that the man in question is just not smart, right?
He could have an IQ of 80.
His wife maybe has an IQ of 80 and they just never really thought about insurance and they can't really make much money and so on.
And of course, that's, I think I certainly would have and do have a lot of sympathy for that.
It's not people's fault in general as a whole.
It's not people's fault how smart they are.
It is to some degree their responsibility to try and gain some wisdom, but it's not hugely their fault because IQ is significantly genetic.
It's not hugely their fault as to whether they are smart or not.
But we can have sympathy for all of that.
But again, the problem is that if you say, well, people with an IQ of 80 or below should be given infinite charity, then people will just pretend to be dumb and they'll do purposefully badly on any IQ test and then get all these free resources.
So, you know, whatever you sympathize with, if you're not dealing with the problem of mimicry, then you're not dealing with anything that any intelligent person would focus on, right?
So if you say, oh, well, redheads will get a lot of charity, right?
Ginger charity, the ginger.
Then all that happens is people will dye their hair red to get the charity, right?
So there's the problem of mimicry in charity.
Whatever standard you have for charity, well, either you'll deal with the problem of mimicry or you deal with the problem of people will fit into that slot.
She say, ah, well, you know, if you have three children by three different men and then they're not sticking around and you'll get a lot of charity, then either people will pretend to have three children by three different men.
And with governments, there's very little incentive to figure out whether the person is deserving, is honest about their issues, right?
Or a woman will just say, well, you know, I've already got two children by two different men.
I'll just have a third one by a third different guy because I know I'm going to get that charity.
And then, right?
So you've got the problem of mimicry and altered decisions.
Whatever standard you have for charity, people will mimic it or will change their decisions to fit that standard.
And it's one of the problems that the intellectual elites have in understanding the poor.
Most intellectual elites don't grow up around the poor, so they don't understand, you know, how, you know, pretty awful the lives of most poor people are, especially if the poverty is caused by a lack of intelligence.
That is pretty bad.
Because of course, what happens is poor people would do just about anything to get on charity because the jobs that are available for poor people who aren't very smart, I mean, the jobs kind of suck.
Like maybe you could be a waiter.
Maybe you can do some sort of basic construction work.
But I mean, you can't be a waiter at a high-end restaurant.
So you're just a waiter in like a, I don't know, some low-end restaurant or whatever it is.
And your job kind of sucks, right?
I mean, especially as you get older.
I mean, I worked with, I worked in a fairly low-end restaurant when I was a teenager.
And listening to the older women complaining about how their feet hurt and their back hurts.
And, you know, they'd be walking all day and so on.
That was rough, man.
They did not enjoy their jobs.
I mean, they did it and it was okay, but they didn't really enjoy it.
And of course, you don't get any intellectual or professional satisfaction out of serving pizza to poor people.
So intellectuals are like, well, gee, I find meaning in my job and I quite enjoy work and I do interesting and enjoyable things a lot of times.
So they don't understand just how few options and how terrible those options are for poor people.
And of course, also, if you're a poor person, not only does your job generally suck, but your boss is pretty trashy as well, because really good bosses move up to manage professionals.
And your coworkers kind of suck as a whole as well.
And your housing kind of sucks.
And your neighborhood kind of sucks.
And your neighbors kind of suck.
And your dating opportunities kind of suck.
And so you'll do almost anything to get off that spiky D4 treadmill of Lego footpain just to get out of the kind of crappy world or life that you live in.
Poor women would rather get money from the government because the men who are available to date these poor women are generally low quality guys.
You know, they drink, they often have short tempers.
They don't make much money.
They're irritable.
They don't have any real emotional self-management.
So if you say to, you know, the daughter of Donald Trump, you know, you could go on welfare, she'd be like, no, I can marry Jared Kushner.
And, you know, I have I have meaningful philanthropical charity work that I love to do.
And like, why and like, are you kidding me?
Why would I, why on earth would I go on welfare, right?
Because you don't need to.
And you can date quality guys and you're in demand and your work, whatever work you do is by choice and meaningful.
And so it's hard for people who grow up in privilege to understand just how desperate poor people are to escape all the trappings of being poor, which a lot of times they're unable to do for various reasons.
Could be health reasons, could be IQ reasons, could be, you know, just being stuck and unable to get away from a really bad family.
Because this is another thing that happens with poor people, is that with poor people, particularly people who aren't smart or the family is not smart, they're just constantly making an endless series of obviously bad decisions.
I mean, obvious to the outside and obviously not obvious on the inside.
But, you know, they keep getting involved.
They drink too much.
They get angry and throw down their tools and walk off the job with no savings.
They take drugs.
They sleep around.
They, you know, drive motorcycles too fast in the rain.
They just do things that aren't smart.
And their kids do things that aren't smart.
So you're just constantly careening like some silver pinball machine from hell.
You're just bouncing off one problem to another problem.
They smoke.
They don't exercise.
They're obese.
And so they get health issues and bad backs and diabetes.
And then there's this chaos and that chaos and this expense and that expense and this problem.
It's just endless stuff.
Again, I don't want to pull any sort of class unprivileged, but I did grow up in these kinds of environments and it is chaotic.
It is terrible.
And it's just nonstop.
Someone is always, oh, so-and-so, they didn't shovel their sidewalk and they slipped and they fell.
Now they've broken their arm and they can't work and blah, blah, blah.
And it's just chaos and mess and problems all the time.
Like all the time.
Oh, no, Jamie's pregnant again or whatever it is, right?
So-and-so got fired because he got drunk and showed up to work with a hangover and still had alcohol on his breath.
And so like it's just constant, relentless series of bad decisions and bad choices and all of that, unwise things.
And that, of course, is debilitating for people.
It's really tough to get out of, of course, the moment you start making any money.
If you're from a sort of poor neighborhood or you have a poor clan or poor extended family, the moment you start making any kind of money, everyone just kind of swarms you.
Oh, I need this debt paid off.
Oh, gambling problems.
And it's just, they'll just hoover up any excess resources that you might have.
You know, in general, not to, oh, I got this great business idea and blah, blah, blah.
Cause, you know, everybody who's broke imagines themselves as a genius entrepreneur.
And it's, you're just, if you can get government money and government benefits in government healthcare rather than rely on your own good decisions or family support or whatever.
Now, you can avoid some of that by being a good, charitable person in, say, a church or something like that.
You can avoid some of these kinds of things.
But even making good decisions like that tends to be beyond the ability of a lot of people who are either unwise, unintelligent, or both, right?
Because you can be unintelligent, but still have a fair amount of wisdom.
But that usually requires some sort of belief structure like religion that is going to teach you these kinds of things or, you know, or a family structure that, right?
Sort of the honorable, decent, hardworking, helpful poor.
You can be intelligent and unwise.
I'm sure.
That's a very common combination.
And you can be unintelligent and unwise, which is why taking away religion tends to be particularly bad for the less intelligent because they just almost immediately turn to hedonism and the religion which helped them defer gratification is taken away.
And so they just act more impulsively and so on, right?
So it's the same thing with the bread.
Like if you're a baker and somebody is desperate for a piece of bread because they're dying, like some human wither skeleton comes along your path and, well, the funny thing is, of course, that bakers always have bread that they're not going to sell, right?
I mean, like my, when I was a teenager, my friend's mother had a boyfriend who was a baker.
And I remember saying to him, he's like, oh, what do you do?
I said, well, what do you do with the bread you don't sell?
Oh, we just next day we say it's one day fresh.
And the next day is two day fresh.
Next day it's three day fresh.
And I said, well, what about 10 day fresh?
He's like, well, that's kind of pushing it.
But in general, so you always have bread that you're very unlikely to sell.
And so you could just take, you know, you see these bag of day-old dinner buns or five-day-old dinner buns or two-day-old dinner buns and it's like 50 cents or whatever it is.
So you've always had bread that's either economically worthless or virtually economically worthless to you.
So of course you will give the person some bread.
Like they won't have to steal it because as a baker, you are always in possession.
And a lot of bakers and a lot of restaurants will, you know, donate the food to the hungry, to the homeless, because they can't sell it and so on, right?
And it's always the question with a buffet.
Do you take anything to go?
I mean, they're just going to throw it out at the end of the night anyway, usually, right?
So the idea that a baker is just going to let someone starve to death right in front of their store, I mean, of course you won't, right?
And even if you're just some cold-hearted sociopath who doesn't care about people starving to death, you still don't want someone to starve to death right in front of your store, right?
I mean, obviously, because if somebody starves to death in front of your store, you've got to call the police, you've got to have the body taken away.
People aren't going to be stepping over a dead body to get into your store.
And of course, the other thing, too, is that you face massive, again, even if you're just some cold-hearted sociopath, you just don't care that somebody's dying in front of your store.
Can you imagine the publicity?
Someone died of starvation right in front of the baker's store and the baker didn't give the person any bread.
I mean, your business would be toast.
Even if you didn't care at all about the person, you do care about your business.
And so the idea that you're just going to let someone starve to death in front of your business and be known as the baker who lets someone starve to death, right, in front of your business, I mean, and have to deal with the loss of business that's going to occur because people don't want to step over a dead body or, you know, whatever.
I mean, like, even if you didn't care at all about the person, you'd give them bread because the bread is virtually economically worthless to you.
And your business will probably go out of business if it becomes known that you would not even give a crust of bread to a starving guy and he died right in front of your store.
And of course, you know, the bakers are part of the community and so on.
So of course you're going to give, like you won't need to steal it, right?
So these are just very artificial situations, right?
Even the doctor who's got the $100,000 medicine, the poor person's wife is dying.
I mean, it could be well worthwhile for him to contact the newspaper and say, listen, I mean, this guy is really broke.
I want to save his wife.
Is there any way that you could kind of write about this?
Or, you know, even the poor person might say, listen, I can get you some positive newspaper articles about this.
And, you know, maybe that would be helpful and could be positive for the business.
Businesses do a lot of charity to get the goodwill of their customers, right?
I mean, and their neighbors, right?
So, I mean, I'm sure you've seen hockey or soccer or baseball uniforms and they have on them stitched, you know, Bob's bakery.
And they will, right?
Because they want to be part of the community and be positively looked upon and not looked upon as just some sort of profitable business only, but there's profit in charity as well.
So as a whole, these are sort of very artificial scenarios.
And the last thing I'll say is that UPB is universal through time.
UPB is universal through time.
And what that means is the timing of consent is not foundational.
Right.
So let's say that some guy's dying and he comes across a bread cart and the guy is away, he's gone to the washroom or, you know, whatever.
And the bread is just there and he takes a piece of bread and gnaws on it and this has him not die.
Has he stolen?
Don't know.
Don't know.
A guy's hanging from a flagpole, kicks in a window, climbs to safety inside someone apartment.
Has he done a break and enter?
Nope.
I don't know.
And I would argue almost certainly not.
The guy has almost certainly not stolen the loaf of bread or the crust of bread or the piece of bread or whatever from the cart where the bread, the baker is away.
It's unattended at the farmer's market or something like that, right?
But of course, if somebody comes staggering in as a human skeleton and dying of hunger, staggers into some farmer's market, like everybody would drop what they're doing to help that person, of course, right?
I mean, I don't know what kind of weird universe people live in, but that would happen.
So if the person takes a crust of bread or a piece of bread from the baker's cart, has he stolen?
Almost certainly not.
Say, ah, but he didn't get permission.
It's like, well, not before.
But if you get permission after, that's fine, right?
If, because someone has to press charges, right?
Somebody has to say, I was wronged.
It was immoral.
It was bad.
I demand that the criminal be locked up and go to trial and so on.
Right.
Now, a baker who is away from his cart, some starving guy grabs a piece of bread and eats it.
The baker will give his permission after the fact.
If you are hanging from a flagpole and you have to kick in a window in order to save yourself and climb into someone's apartment, the question is, is there a reason to believe that the person would give their permission before the fact if they could?
So if the baker was there and some guy said, I'm dying of starvation, can you give me one piece of bread, which is worth like pennies to the baker, or nothing if it's too old, but it can still be eaten because people won't generally buy it to eat later if it's kind of old, but you can eat it in the moment.
So will the baker give permission to the starving man to have a loaf of bread if the baker were there?
Well, yeah, yes.
Would the person who owns the apartment give you permission if he could, if you phoned him and said, I'm about to die, do you mind if I kick in your window and save myself?
The person would say yes.
And even if you have some psycho who later says no, then You would not be prosecuted because you would have every reason to believe the person would say yes.
Like if there's a life jacket on a boat that's unattended on a dock and somebody's dying, drowning, and they need a life jacket thrown to them.
Let's say there's a bunch of people, none of them swim, someone falls into the water and they're drowning and nobody can go in to save them because they can't swim either.
Can they grab the life jacket and throw it to the person who's drowning?
Well, sure.
Because if the boat owner was there and they asked for permission, the boat owner would certainly give it.
So you have every reason to believe that the boat owner would give permission.
You say, ah, yes, but there could be one in a million boat owners who doesn't.
It's like, yeah, but they still won't get prosecuted.
Right?
Because what matters in morality is what actually happens in the world.
And if you grab a life jacket from some boat owner to save a child who's drowning and the boat owner tries to press charges, he would simply get laughed out of court.
Like not only laughed, people would be full of contempt and consider him psycho.
Like there would be no, there would be no rational court that would say, oh, yeah, well, you should definitely be prosecuted for grabbing an unused, unattended life jacket and throwing it to a drowning child.
That's theft and you should definitely be prosecuted.
Like there is zero rational court system that would pursue that case.
And it would be like viewed as like it would be viewed as like the person would be viewed as mentally ill.
Like what is the matter with you that you want to prosecute someone who got your life jacket wet and then it dried and it wasn't harmed and it saved a child's life and now you want to throw them in prison for theft.
Right?
Like, what do you mean, some guy stole, quote, some guy took a piece of bread without your permission because he was starving to death?
Like, what do you mean?
Right?
It's sort of like the story of somebody who's lost in the woods and they come across a cabin with food in it and it's unlocked.
Can they go in and take a can of food and use a phone?
Like maybe there's a satellite phone or something in there.
Well, of course they can, right?
Because if they could, if they could phone the person who owned the cabin and say, listen, I'm starving to death.
Can I go into your cabin and get a little food?
People would say, well, yeah, of course you can, right?
So it's not theft if you have reason to believe that the person would give permission ahead of time.
It's not theft.
It's also not theft if it will never be prosecuted.
Like in no sane universe would someone be prosecuted for using a life jacket to save a child without the permission of the life jacket owner, especially if they returned it and so on, right?
Like in no sane universe.
So it will never happen that that person would be prosecuted.
So it is not theft if permission is given after the fact, if you have every reason to believe that permission would be given if permission could be asked.
And also it's not theft if even if permission is not granted after the fact, if that would be considered the mark of a crazy person and it would never be prosecuted in any way, shape, or form.
So anyway, I hope that makes sense.
Don't worry about these kinds of issues.
They are not extremist tests of property rights.
They are just average tests of people who aren't particularly smart, like these sort of gotchas.
I mean, the gotcha is you're too dumb to understand secondary effects.
It's not your fault, but people shouldn't be taken seriously in this area.