Another Case for the Complexity of Theft.

 The continuing complexity of the nature of theft. (Part 3)

Recently I had purchased a copy of a Magic card on an online site that assembles vendors for the purpose of selling cards.  The site categorizes the cards by price, printing, and company working within the site for the sake of making purchases convenient.  While making a purchase for a relatively inexpensive card, there was a mistake made.  I was sent a significantly more expensive version of the card by accident.  This made for a complex ethical dilemma that involved a dynamic series of factors.  It was yet again, further proof of the complexity of theft and our proprietary agreements that we make with one another. 

I am a bit mortified to admit this but, my first instinct was to take the shipping error as a victory for my card collection.  I paused to reflect the consequences of this error to the vendor that had made the mistake.  I felt justified by believing the validity of mindset of caveat venditor.  It is common in the cultural context of the United States to hold vendors accountable for mistakes made and leave such errors to the benefit of the buyer.  The nature of civil lawsuits favoring the victims of faulty products over their manufactures show this as a demonstratable pattern.  

    Earlier in the history of the United States the policy of caveat emptor was the prevalent mentality insofar as transactions.  It was up to the consumer to know a good product or company from a bad one.  This was especially true of British culture.  Things have changed significantly from the days of “you break it, you bought it.”  At my current job someone can drop a $10 jar of whatever, and the store is forced to eat the loses.  Too often the store is also forced to take virtually all refunds that are presented to it.   

    This illustrates that proprietary agreements that constitute what is considered theft are relativistic.  Moreover, the factors that determine how theft is relativistic are both cultural and temporal.  This shift in beliefs from caveat emptor to caveat venditor makes it far easier for me believe that I am entitled to keep the higher value item.  There are many who might agree with that sentiment.  Maybe that would not have been the case 75 years ago or in some other part of the world, but it certainly is the case here and now. 

    The news of my luck became a topic that I became eager to share with others.  So much so that I mentioned it to several people while playing Magic during commander night at a local game store.  One of the other players told me that I had an obligation to notify the seller on the website that I was sent an incorrect version of the card.  It would then be up to the seller and I to come to an agreement on what to do next.   The person that told me this mentioned that it was policy of the website for me to do so.  I even fact checked it, and indeed, there was a FAQ page on the website that confirmed this.  This excited a series of moral complications within me related to the situation that I was now put in. 

    I first had to come to grips with the fact that I was participating in a transaction in which I was not familiar with all the rules of.  It is not explicitly stated on the website that I would be required to have to return something if the sender made the error.  I now felt like I was in the odd position of someone who had felt they had a valid proprietary claim over the item but was mistaken.  The situation turned from a perceived stroke of luck to a burden of responsibility.  Even if it is fair to return the item to the vendor, the fact remains that I got to experience owning a superior item.  It was like going to restaurant and getting a taste of some fancy aged wine and having the waiter yank the glass away and hand me the house port.  The feeling of loss is still real. 

    This means that sometimes we form agreements about what we think we own, and we feel those agreements get violated for the sake of preventing another's agreement from being violated.  Which party gets to determine who was most damaged by the violation of agreements?  This becomes a complex ethical web that could even result in a court case and the establishment of legal precedent.   There is the example of the hunter who followed his wounded prey into the neighbor's property, the neighbor finished off the prey, and a serious question remained:  Who would claim the hunted animal since it crossed property lines?  Theft is not such a simple thing to determine. 

    Returning to the original example, I had to spend my time to send a message to the vendor.  I am now currently awaiting a response from that vendor, under a very minute amount of stress regarding whether I can keep the mistakenly sent item.  If they want it back, I need to go through the chore of sending the item back and waiting for a replacement for the original item sent.  The whole ordeal becomes a major inconvenience for me for the sake of claiming that I made a morally sound decision.  Would I have even violated an agreement if I never mentioned this to the vendor?  More significantly, if I had never mentioned this error to anyone else, I would have been ignorantly keeping something that I was not entitled to.  Maybe some form of common moral principle might have still required action on my part. 

    My example revolves around the complexity of two private parties in exchanging goods for monetary payments.  There is also the dynamic and complex nature of public ownership of items.  Another important example might be the complications regarding an item like a cart in a grocery store.  We can assume that the ownership of the cart is solely that of the company that owns the store.  However, the transfer of ownership is conferred to that of each shopper as they use the carts.  The customer then recognizes the cart as “theirs,” while it is being filled with items they intend to purchase.  The items and the cart both belong to the store while the shopping is being conducted but that changes after payment is made and the items are removed. 

    There is another problem that arises when a person walks away from their cart to find that another person has taken the cart without permission.  This is considered theft by many even though neither customer can claim ownership of the cart no matter what part of the transaction they are engaged in.  This establishes the genesis of a temporary bubble of ownership that is assumed on the part of the party who took the cart first.  No such bubble applies to someone taking the item before the first person is finished with it.  The first party must relinquish ownership and agree that they are done with the cart so that the bubble of ownership may be conferred to another party.  

    This is all based on the assumption that the first person to get the cart is the justified temporary owner.  This can also be understood as an invalid claim of ownership if say, the first person pushed the second person out of the way to grab the cart first.  Now the question is not what party got to the cart first, but rather, which party was morally entitled to the cart.  These are all agreements that exist independently of proprietary concerns but still fall under the scope of theft. 

    Interestingly, since the cart belonged to neither patron of the grocery store, neither party could press charges that the cart was stolen.  The store, however, could press charges if someone tried to take the cart home with them.  Legal, moral, and personal agreements all exist in a nebulous area that separates law from morality (see also: Positivism.)  Even though it is legal to commandeer someone's cart while they are grabbing rice, it is still considered immoral.  Furthermore, pushing someone out of the way and causing harm for the purpose of getting to the cart first, is illegal.  Situations, societal values, human understandings of morality and consequence all make up the seriousness of the agreements we all engage in. 

    The concept of taking a grocery cart becomes that of ownership within ownership or maybe; “meta ownership.”  This suggests that both understandings of ownership and agreements about what constitutes theft are on a spectrum of some form.  This spectrum relates to the seriousness of the violation of those agreements.  Stealing the cart while in the store to avoid looking for another cart is one thing, but taking the groceries from that that cart and putting them into your car is another.  What about scarce items that still belong to the store?  What occurs when there is only one bag of potato chips on the shelf and two customers both show an interest in purchasing it at the same time.  It becomes a matter of reaching an agreement between them to resolve the impending conflict.  This can involve bringing the manager of the store to try to provide some kind of arbitration to matter.  Is this fair?  Is the manager even qualified to settle such a disagreement? 

    Let us discuss the concept of temporary ownership in the sphere of public control.  For example, students told to find their own desks might disagree about who sits next to a window or at the front of the classroom.  The agreement that alacrity determines this temporary ownership is not necessarily an agreement that they all might choose.  For example, there might be a disabled (likely physical) person who prefers a seat but is unable to get to the seat of their choosing due to the slowness of moving in their condition.  It would be unfair in the eyes of many not to give them a fair chance to choose what seat to take.  On the other hand, if selection becomes a matter of giving preference to the disabled, that still makes the competition that the other students are subject to unfair.  We could even discover that the person who might have a disability disagrees with preferential treatment and will take whatever chair they can get.  These values of what desk belongs with what student continue to be agreements that we engage in. They are not set in stone, and they could change and be malleable. 

    We should also pause to reflect how it came to pass that an organization such as a company can own something.  The notion that an object is company owned can be traced back to the application of the 14th amendment.  The case of the Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886) demonstrated that the Supreme Court was willing to rule that corporations were granted proprietary rights.  This was because the 14th amendment guaranteed that they would be treated as persons and thus protected by the Constitution.  We should also note that this court decision was not unique, and the Supreme Court reached many decisions during the Gilded Age that enforced the philosophy that corporations had property rights.  It is still complex when one considers that a corporation is composed of many people and its interests are technically divided amongst them.  The method in which to determine how a given company would choose to utilize its property is determined by a form of sovereignty principle.  Whoever or whomever controls the company makes the decisions about how ownership of the company's assets.

    The sovereignty principle is used in the case of both corporate and government interests.  There is always one method or another in determining what parties have control over the nation or company.  In some cases, it is outright force of law, in others it is by monetary control, some by direct rule of the masses, and whatever system based on consensus is the system by which corporate or political sovereignty is derived. While they are both similar, it is assumed that political sovereigns can supersede corporate ones based on the assumption that political power trumps economic power.  However, based on the power of special interests, this can be disproven due to de facto control of authority.  In whatever case either political or economic, all of the rights of ownership must be established by a system of agreements that define any sort of sovereign body.  Sovereignty only exists because we agree it exists.

    The purpose of discussing differences occurring within public ownership and private ownership as they relate to theft demonstrates a clear conflict of interests in what agreements we make.  A more diverse society may become more populated with varying and conflicting agreements.  This creates a difficulty of determining what constitutes theft if we cannot isolate the rules of ownership and at what point something falls under private or public ownership.  We need to make agreements based on a larger consensus.  This of course brings us the dilemma of the “tyranny of the majority.”  This phrase indicates that despite the fact that the majority of people may benefit from one particular set of agreements, does mean that people outside that dominant group should fall victim to that society.  This might incentivize the population to create as few situations as possible for outliers to exist.

    The nature of the group matters as it relates to ethics.  To return to the original problem faced by the author, we must understand the Magic the Gathering community.  While it does not follow that Magic players are rich per say, but there is a large portion of that community that falls into a higher disposable income bracket.  People within those social circles can have a tendency to enforce stricter ethical guidelines to those communities.  Would a person have the same obligation to return to the grocery store and return a more expensive type of apple if they were undercharged?  In the case of the grocery (an arena where I work), the customer is no longer accountable once the store has collected its money.   People rarely return to the store when they underpay for items.  It happens, but it is not common. 

    Perhaps this due to some larger societal and cultural agreements about commonplace ethics.  Groceries are considered essential goods and therefore the necessity to return them would appear to be less important.  Also, it might be inconvenient and costly to travel to the grocery store to return said undercharged apples and pay for a more expensive variety.  What about the more clear-cut case of theft whereby the person walks out of the store with stolen food items?  This almost seems to be more forgivable due to the fact that people in society understand the importance of feeding yourself and your loved ones.  Of course, if someone were stealing highly expensive steaks, that level of forgiveness might be decreased.  The nature of how we tolerate theft is a value system also based on agreements as well.  We agree when someone owns something, and we agree when it is immoral when it is taken away.  We also agree when certain instances of theft are more reprehensible than others. 

    The wealth of the person taking something, the nature of the item of question, the reason behind the taking of an item, how the item was taken, who the item was taken from, and so many countless other factors determine how society (or a large portion of it) reacts to such a theft.  Circumstances matter in terms of the agreements that people make regarding property and theft.  Since all of these circumstances are factored into the equation when it is believed that theft occurred, there is no simple way to make a rule, law, or moral code.  How do we determine what is constituted to be theft, its severity, and its consequences by a system of rules?  The current American society takes those factors into consideration in both law enforcement and judicial action.  We can only hope that it is doing its job effectively. 

"Thou shalt not steal" is a handy reference but lacks explanatory power, which are the goals inherent in the essays that I am writing.