Robin's Moral Conundrum

Me, myself and my inner utilitarian were recently arguing over the justifiability of the Robin Hood ethic of robbing the rich to feed the poor [1]. So I thought I might think about it a bit more with a blog.

Hypothetical situation: You are paying for a meal at a restaurant and the cashier gives you $10 extra change, which you return without thinking, as I presume most of us would. Walking back home you pass a homeless person and so you give him $10 for dinner. Walking on you pass a second homeless person, but find that you have no more cash on you so you leave him nothing. Now he will go and eat his dinner out of a trash can, an end you would have prevented had you kept the additional change rather than returning it.

Clearly the restaurant is the lawful owner of the $10, but is it the rightful owner? The $10 would make a real difference to the homeless person, but would have been dismissed as shrinkage with little thought or care by the restaurant. Presumably a utilitarian perspective would then support the theft.

Is it morally significant that the rule of law is breached? Romans 13:1-7, 1 Peter 2:13, Titus 3:1 seem to suggest so. But surely our case is entirely unlike, say, an armed robbery, which creates fear and disorder on a wide scale. Our situation seems more like a civil dispute than a criminal offence since no-one but the restaurant seems to be negatively impacted at all. Neither was this ‘theft’ planned; rather, circumstances were outside of the control of the agent; it was almost as if luck had bestowed on him the opportunity. Is this then not an act against the authority?

But perhaps it is wrong because the agent is claiming for himself the power over a decision that rightfully belongs to the lawful owners of the money. In providing their service, the restaurant acquired the right to the money and removing their property right may be wrong in principle. Eighth commandment: Do not steal. I think it is fair to say that not giving someone their property is equivalent to taking it away from them [2].

But does the right to property outweigh all others? Or is the right to subsistence more essential and able to ‘trump’ property rights. I think most people would agree that some rights are of greater weight than others. For example, Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that: “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including…periodic holidays with pay” - an assertion that seems almost trivial beside the right to life, liberty and security of the person, or freedom of expression. So then, can we say it is better to deny a man his property rights than let a man starve? In our hypothetical situation both can not be had; either one actively breaks a rights, or passively submits to one being broken. What is one to do?

So far I think I have just asked the questions without giving much opinion (not that ethics is a matter of opinion - you heard me all you moral relativists, not a matter of opinion). Basically I have to say that one must give the change to the lawful owner and, operating within the constraints of the law, do as much as possible to assist the more needy person. If you discard absolutes such as those that prevent stealing then you place yourself on shaky moral ground, and its only a matter of time before you lose your balance.


[1] Not that Robin Hood ever robbed, he just sort of borrowed a bit from those who could afford it, to cite the classic Disney movie
[2] So, unfortunately for Robin, failure to return borrowed funds adds up to the same thing as robbing. Can’t escape on a technicality there.

Total Depravity

I have recently been reading about the Stanford Prison Experiment - an 1971 psychology study of prison life by Philip Zimbardo. In the experiment twenty-four young men, chosen to be the most healthy and ‘normal’ available, were given roles as either prisoners or prison guards.

‘Prisoners’ were ‘arrested’, dressed in smocks, chained at the ankles and locked up in cells. ‘Guards’ were given khaki uniforms and wooden batons and told: “You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled”.

Originally intended to last two weeks, the experiment was terminated after six days on the grounds that it was unethical. Over the six days the guards had “steadily increased their coercive aggression tactics, humiliation and dehumanisation of the prisoners," Zimbardo recalls. Prisoners were stripped naked and place in solitary confinement, forced to clean toilet bowls with bare hands, simulate sodomy, or urged to turn on their fellow inmates, with the worst instances of abuse occurring during the night when the guards thought the staff were not watching.

Most of the guards were upset when the experiment concluded early.

How, I wonder, could ordinary college students descend so quickly to this level of sadistic cruelty? And if they were just normal, young men does that mean I would have done the same in such a position? Of course I want to say I wouldn’t have, and never could; I want to say I am different in some essential way, but in the end I don’t think I am. I remember shamefully times in the schoolyard joining in the taunts of my classmates, deriding and humiliating an easy target.

I remember asking similar questions in Year 9 English when I first read Lord of the Flies - the William Golding novel about a group of British boys who, stranded on a inland, turn rapidly into savages. I don’t think I took as much away form the book as I should have. It was fiction, so I could distance myself from the implications. And there was Piggy, the boy who never forgot about that understandable and lawful world, even as it slipped away - perhaps he could be my moral equivalent. I guess I was clutching straws; anything that might suggest I wouldn’t be given over to the same desire to squeeze and hurt that the even Ralph found over-mastering.

Golding said of his novel: “The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. Before the war, most Europeans believed that man could be perfected by perfecting his society. We all saw a hell of a lot in the war that can't be accounted for except on the basis of original evil.” I think we have fallen again into the trap of the pre-war Europeans - we believe we can protect ourselves from the beast within.

After the horrendous images emerged from Abu Ghraib prison we were prepared to point the finger towards the soldiers, and the army who failed to monitor the situation, and the war which put them there. But perhaps the only reason this happened was to avoid facing the obvious truth that any of us could have done this; the realization that all our feeling of moral respectability are as fragile as a house of cards, set to blow over with the next gust of wind.