For the sake of blogging and self-exploration and contemplation, I answer a question a day off of this list.
Today’s question : Is stealing to feed a starving child wrong?
Rather than focusing on the specifics of this question (the matter of stealing) I’m choosing to address the raw matter of the question, which if broken down is, “Is it okay to do the wrong thing for the right reason?”
Personally, I never spend much time contemplating the thing that a person did/said/etc, in itself. I look beyond it, and I look at the person’s intentions. An act itself might be “right” or “wrong” on principle, i.e. yes, it’s wrong to steal, BUT, whether or not I feel the person made the wrong CHOICE is entirely dependent on their reasoning behind an act. Was it wrong for Robin Hood to steal from the rich to give to the poor? Lets look at that from a broader perspective. I now have a job I really like, and it’s mostly deskwork so by the end of a long day, I’m not so exhausted that I can’t function and have to head straight to my couch or bed. I’m not saying I don’t work hard, but it’s a different kind of work. I’m also getting paid twice as much to do this as I ever did I slaved away with jobs involving a lot of physical labor on my feet, which at the end of the day FEELS like you worked So. Much. HARDER.
Minimum wage in this country is NOT minimum living expenses, at all. No one making minimum wage can actually afford to live on their own, etc.
Yet the uber-rich making millions, even billions, are sitting at desk, making phone calls, and are able to end their day by going out on their private jet. Say someone stole one hundred million dollars from a billionaire, and with that money bought food for the starving, helped the homeless with housing, etc – even though the act of stealing is wrong, I don’t think I could bring myself to judge them, at all, because the intentions behind their act would have been compassion.
Ultimately, yes I do think that stealing is wrong and that’s not the ideal way to go about solving the problem of starvation, but I don’t feel like I can, in good conscience, pass judgment or point a finger at someone who did that. Acts can be right or wrong, but I am a firm believer that an action is just he end result of a chain of choices that all come from an original intention, and looking at the intention will tell you so much more about a person than just looking at the action itself.
Kell Frillman - Author 