I'm apparently in the minority, but, after reading the article, I still maintain that there is never a reason to steal from your fellow man. The potential for abuse due to hunger being subjective notwithstanding, there are social programs in place to accommodate the needy. Do they not have these programs in Italy? I am a very compassionate, empathetic (to a fault) person, but I just don't see the justification for the theft. Ask me for help, and I'm there, but please don't steal from me and think that it's okay. I am, however, open to enlightenment.
In other news, sky is blue and water is wet. From the Italian criminal code:<p>Criminal Code, article 54 – State of necessity: “A person is not punishable for having committed an act that he was forced to do in order to save himself or others from an existing risk of severe harm, a risk not voluntarily caused by him, nor otherwise avoidable, always provided that the act is proportional to the risk”.
The way the judges worded this decision makes it a lot less of a slippery slope. This was only accepted because it was an "Immediate and essential need for nourishment." I expect that if more people started stealing, they'd be put through a court process to prove that they were in this condition.<p>What this doesn't do is fix the problem though, it just recognizes a symptom. Why are these people forced to resort to stealing?
As the bible says
<a href="http://www.bibleserver.com/text/ESV/Deuteronomy23%2C25" rel="nofollow">http://www.bibleserver.com/text/ESV/Deuteronomy23%2C25</a><p>> If you go into your neighbor’s vineyard, you may eat your fill of grapes, as many as you wish, but you shall not put any in your bag. 25 If you go into your neighbor’s standing grain, you may pluck the ears with your hand, but you shall not put a sickle to your neighbor’s standing grain.<p>Stealing food is okay sometimes. There's even a word in German for it Mundraub.
Reminds me of the third islamic caliph, Omar ibn Khattab, who suspend punishment for thief on famine. [1]
I wonder if there is another legal presedence beside it.<p>[1]<a href="https://books.google.co.id/books?id=ZRqe3iPwsTkC&pg=PA36&lpg=PA36&dq=omar+bin+khattab+thief+hungry&source=bl&ots=UOOfbPvzfB&sig=9ppWu9Dqt6IMgJA1tH80N4WvIRc&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=omar%20bin%20khattab%20thief%20hungry&f=false" rel="nofollow">https://books.google.co.id/books?id=ZRqe3iPwsTkC&pg=PA36&lpg...</a>
It's a little hard to understand how this ruling won't cause a certain degree of chaos. Can any hungry, homeless person now steal food from any store in Italy without repercussion? Certainly as a matter of compassion, this ruling can be argued as being reasonable, but how can it work as a practical matter?
If you're gonna force business owners to give to the poor, why not do it through an established and equitable mechanism like taxation/redistribution, instead of subjecting select types of business owners to the whims of a mostly subjective claim? Why force the burden on a bakery but not a tailor or a chocolatier?<p>I can't help but be concerned about this growing trend of governments slowly pushing off the burden of general welfare onto businesses. You see it in the US with health care being the responsibility of the employer, affordable housing mandates on real estate developers, and minimum wage increases in expensive areas. All of these "solutions" to poverty have huge unintended consequences, even if they partially address the problem. The problem of poverty isn't solved by forcing businesses to be compassionate, it is solved by governments doing their fucking job and taxing everybody equitably to do so.
A reasonable stance of compassion. It's a reprieve from the more common misanthropic Randian attitudes towards the poor. Be nice to the poor, there are so many things beyond our control that could make any of us poor tomorrow.
>In 2015, Mr Ostriakov was convicted of theft and sentenced to six months in jail and a €100 fine.<p>The first judge clearly messed up. A suspended sentence would have been ideal in this case.
When thou comest into thy neighbour's vineyard, then thou mayest eat grapes thy fill at thine own pleasure; but thou shalt not put any in thy vessel.<p>When thou comest into the standing corn of thy neighbour, then thou mayest pluck the ears with thine hand; but thou shalt not move a sickle unto thy neighbour's standing corn.<p>Deuteronomy 23, 24-25
<p><pre><code> Ci hanno insegnato la meraviglia
verso la gente che ruba il pane
ora sappiamo che è un delitto
il non rubare quando si ha fame
</code></pre>
Fabrizio De André (very influential singer-songwriter of the '60s-'70s)<p><pre><code> They taught us the wonder
for the people who steal bread.
Now we know that it’s a crime,
not stealing when one is hungry.
</code></pre>
(English translation from <a href="http://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?id=3225" rel="nofollow">http://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?id=3225</a> )
It definitely makes a nice headline, it might work in this specific case. Damn it might even work in an utopian world where everyone is absolutely honest and has high moral standards.<p>But applied widely in real world, it's just won't work. There are too many people who would exploit such a system and cause chaos.
Seems reasonable. Not like he was nicking razor blades and booze just some necessities. Shame it had to go so far but hopefully it will prevent similar court action or arrests in future.
One merely has to wonder whether a starving homeless man can be prosecuted for "stealing" from another starving homeless man? Do we need to judge who was more starving?
"How noble the law, in its majestic equality, that both the rich and poor are equally prohibited from peeing in the streets, sleeping under bridges, and stealing bread!" -- Anatole France
I have been homeless and hungry while working a manual labor job. I applied for SNAP and should have been able to get benefits within three days. But I was told I'm not homeless. I couldn't prove I was homeless. Shelters have certain hours as do the food kitchens and I worked during those hours. I asked many people for help and food, but they said no. So when I felt especially desperate I stole a granola that cost about $2. The safety nets, so that people don't have to go hungry failed me.
But if the food is locked away, it's presumably still a crime to damage property and/or bypass a lock to obtain the food. So this interpretation of the law creates an incentive for grocers to keep food out of reach.<p>And thirst being even more basic than hunger, is it excusable to steal beer when desperately dehydrated or just bottled water?<p>If food is deemed an inalienable right, then a tax to feed the hungry seems like a better way to avoid legal inconsistency.
Until 1975 German law had a <i>Mundraub</i> [1] (theft for the mouth) clause (§ 248a Abs. 2 StGB a.F.). It was concerned with the theft of small amounts of food for
immediate consumption, like eating an apple from your neighbor's garden.<p>[1] <a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundraub" rel="nofollow">https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundraub</a>
In theory, neither the store or those in need would want to deal with the hassle of theft being the way to deal with the ruling. My guess is stories would just start giving food to the hungry as needed, and then past the costs onto the customers.<p>Why would this not work?
The Judeo-Christian Bible calls this "gleaning". From what I understand, it was considered an essential part of the social safety net and farmers who erected fences to keep truly needful gleaners out were considered sinful.
What is going to stop a crowd of justifiably hungry people looting a grocery store causing the grocer to become homeless themselves and thus making the problem worse? The government has no right to sanction someone's property as "ok" to be stolen because of need. I'm generally not in favor of imminent domain for a public works project either, but that's another matter). This ruling is an act of aggression by the government against the non-hungry that steals not only their property, but their liberty. Most of us do not want anyone going hungry, but this is not the solution.
I can't imagine what is feels like to be hungry for few days and no money to buy food.
May be in that state some human minds ignore morals, pride, social and legal concequnces of stealing food.
In a perfect world this may work (arguably it wouldn't be needed).<p>How does it address professional thieves who steal to order, now they can just argue that they were hungry. Frozen meat is often stolen as it has a high value to weight ratio.<p>Many small business owners are far from rich, can they steal from their suppliers to make up for the losses?
from the article<p>>>Stealing small quantities of food to satisfy a vital need for food did not constitute a crime, the court wrote.<p>What about the loss sustained by the owner? Or perhaps if the "not-so-rich clerk" at the supermarket was in charge of the goods and had to pay for the losses? Whose going to give that "not-so-rich clerk" the lost money?<p>Tomorrow if a thousand "hungry" people stole "small quantities of food to satisfy a vital need for food" then what?<p>I mean, such "populist" rulings are ultimately antithetical to democracy based society.
Meanwhile the supermarket probably wasted many kilos of food the night before and locked the bin they threw it into. That is the crime that should be punished.
May be the true reason of ruling is too many people, such as refuges, preferring live in jail. All they have to do is commit a petty crime occasionally.
That makes sense morally but are there actually starving people in first world nations? There are food banks, shelters, and churches that provide food, at least in America.
I see the good intention but I don't see it working out well for businesses. Maybe it will work in Italy? I know it would be a $h!t show here in Seattle.
To massively simplify a complex debate, there are 2 main schools of thought with respect to how to decrease future crime once a criminal has been apprehended [1]. The first is to make the punishment disincentivize future transgressions, and the second is to rehabilitate the criminal so that they won't make the decision to break the law again. Recently, society has been coming to terms with the fact that strict sentencing laws don't work in many situations (and often have unforeseen consequences, like the Revolving Door effect in American prisons [2]). In this situation, as much as we wish we could have directed the poor man to the nearest homeless shelter serving hot soup, it doesn't seem likely that taking away the threat of a 6 month prison stay would make him less likely to do that. The various hardships that are overindexed in the homeless population, from drug addiction to mental illness [3] (to perhaps a language barrier in this case) not only make them less likely to be able to find food consistently, but also make them less likely to respond to criminal disincentives.<p>It is a more enlightened philosophy of justice to acknowledge that saying 'you should have known better' won't make people know better. As the concept of morality progresses from a simple Hammurabian ear-for-an-ear justice game to a nuanced empirically-founded optimization problem, it will be interesting to see whether or not people continue to take pleasure in exerting it. That the latter problem tends to be incredibly engrossing to the technically literate means many of us will respond to this quite positively.<p>Postscript: If morality were a solved problem, would there be as many Effective Altruists?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug03/rehab.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug03/rehab.aspx</a>
[2] <a href="http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/0001/01/01/state-of-recidivism" rel="nofollow">http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/00...</a>
[3] <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Adriana_Foster/publication/230755953_Homelessness_in_schizophrenia/links/540dafa10cf2df04e7564937.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Adriana_Foster/publicat...</a> | relevant quote : estimation of mood disorders at "12% to 30% in various homeless samples".
Sooo, what if he was stealing from a soup kitchen? Or if the prosecutor could prove that there was food available through charity? Or that the man had money, but didn't want to spend it on food? Seems like an awfully broad precedent (assuming Italian courts work the same way as US courts).
Europeans (DHH for example) constantly brag about what great social safety nets the European countries provide for their people, and that US style charities are a waste. Implying charity money should be given to the government as tax money and let the state do their work instead.<p>Italy has just admitted that it can't take care of its citizens' basic needs. I'm not saying it's time to eat crow, but I am saying it's time to realize that both systems have flaws and there's no reason to get righteous about one approach over another.
I'm interested, what test do they perform to check if a person in question was hungry?/s Still, it's a bad precedence imho, so according to such logic, a homeless person could also invade my home and sleep in my bed, because he can't afford his own.
I have wondered whether this applies to the ethics of piracy too.<p>For example, on release of a blockbuster movie - the distributor will do blanket advertising saturating every channel trying to manufacture a demand - tv, internet, sides of buses, roadside-hoardings, in taxis, talk shows, newspaper native ads etc. You just can't escape even in your own home eating your breakfast cereal when the box is smeared with adverts.<p>If a demand has been manufactured by a catastrophic pollution of our environment, I can't blame anyone for satisfying it without paying the maker. They didn't really have a choice.