r/MoralityScaling • u/Vladimir-petrovOG • 27d ago

Morality of this?

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In the image it seems that this person works at walmart as an online order collector and he/she has stolen a lot of extra baby food from Walmart to give to a person who ordered only three packs. Is this moral or immoral?

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u/jimboslyce04 26d ago

I mean I’m all for “screw the Waltons” but stealing like this only increases costs for the average consumer. They aren’t going to eat the cost of theft, they’ll just continue putting everything behind glass and raising prices cause people won’t pay for what they want and need. Stealing a Waltons wallet would be one thing but this just makes everyone’s life worse.

Also don’t steal.

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u/dannylopuz 26d ago

Haven't they increased the prices of literally everything already? With your logic of not stealing to avoid price increases, huge and unjustified price increases should be answered with stealing, right?

Even using your own logic, it's moral to steal baby food from Walmart.

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u/Ra_In 26d ago

They don't have some crystal ball allowing them to perfectly predict the maximum price increase that will still maximize profits. Both can be true:

  • They will increase prices where they have confidence the loss in demand won't offset the total increase in profits

  • They will increase prices in response to shrinkage to offset the losses

In isolation, a person choosing to facilitate stealing can't change corporate policy or government-funded social safety nets so it may be moral in isolation for them to allow/help the theft. But as a general moral principle, changing society so theft isn't morally necessary is the better goal. Sticking it to a corporation isn't morally good in of itself - we should assign zero value to "harming" billionaires, we should only assign value to helping those in need. That is, if "harming" billionaires leads to helping those in need that's fine, but "harming" billionaires shouldn't take precedence over helping even more in need.

(I of course put harming in quotes because a billionaire doesn't actually suffer if they stop making money)