Go Forth and … Shoplift?
Jan 4th, 2010 • Posted in: Commentaryby Rushworth M. Kidder
What’s surprising about the story of Reverend Tim Jones is not that, in his pre-Christmas sermon, he urged the poor in his parish in York, England, to go forth and shoplift. In the ethics trade, after all, one of the oldest chestnuts is the Jean Valjean question: Would you, like the hero of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, steal bread to feed your starving family? That query provokes lively conversation in even the dullest ethics classroom, as Rev. Jones found out when he baldly stated, “My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift.”
Nor is it surprising that he chose the Christmas week to launch his mandate. He was perhaps courting a replay of his 2008 news-making effort, when he garnered attention by going into a local stationery store and throwing Playboy merchandise on the floor. This year, in a season when serious news is in short supply, his message was quickly picked up by BBC editors and put into reverb mode by the British commentariat.
Nor is it surprising that his “Thou shalt shoplift” sermon (as the BBC headlined it) drew both official outrage (”highly irresponsible,” said the North Yorkshire Police) and ecclesiastical hand-wringing (”shoplifting is not the way,” said the Archdeacon of York). That was expected and obligatory.
Nor is it surprising that he evoked the language of impassioned social reform. Echoing the social-welfare tradition of such icons as Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, and the Fabian Society, he even sought to imbue his social proposition with economic theory. “I would ask that they do not steal from small, family businesses,” he counseled, “but from large, national businesses, knowing that the costs are ultimately passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher prices.”
No, what’s truly surprising was the befuddled moral reasoning that caused even some ethicists to equivocate on the morality of his proposition. What’s surprising is why we, and he, found it so uncomfortable to say flatly, “This proposition is unethical.”
I’m not an anthropologist, but my understanding is that “Don’t steal” is a universal moral prohibition, shared in some form by societies everywhere. There are, of course, certain approved forms of sharing — as in communal societies that hold property in common, or in agrarian cultures where the poor glean grain left behind by harvesters. But these are consensual arrangements, agreed upon in advance. Did Rev. Jones go first to “national businesses” and get a green light for shoplifting?
If so, he might have escaped moral sanction, though he would have faced fierce pushback from retailers. In the United States, retailers lost $12.7 billion to shoplifting, according to the 2009 National Retail Security Survey. That number, equaling half of 1 percent of sales, may sound small. In an industry employing 24 million people, however, that loss potentially puts 120,000 people out of work. Suppose these newly jobless all arrived in York, drank Jones’s elixir, and went forth to shoplift. How much additional joblessness would they create? Where would the cycle end?
But even this argument is a symptom of the deeper conceptual problem. Why? Because its logic is all ends based, focusing only on outcomes and consequences. Do A, this logic insists, and B inevitably will follow. Under such a consequentialist ethic, if B turns out to be good, then you made an ethical choice. Looking at “Thou shalt shoplift” from this perspective, it’s easy to see that the situation of a few poor families in York would be immensely improved if they shoplifted, while the probability of 120,000 unemployed Americans flocking to York is vanishingly small. The flaw, here, is that this logic skates perilously close to the moral bankruptcy of “the end justifies the means,” which would argue that (since outcomes alone determine ethics) any bad policy is acceptable if only it can be seen to benefit the poor.
In fact, however, most people encountering this case don’t think outcomes determine ethics. Instead, they’re outraged — a response they’re likely to explain not on the basis of consequences but of principles. While they may never have heard of Immanuel Kant, they instinctively turn to his rule-based ethic, which asks us to obey only that principle we’d like everyone in the world to obey. For Kant, consequences were unimportant: How a thing turns out, he argued, tells you nothing about whether it was right. Do you want a world where people always shoplift whenever they feel poor or a world where the principle of property rights is always respected? Get the principle right, Kant argued, and the long-term result will be the most ethical, just, and fair society.
These two propositions divide even the ethicists. If you yearn to justify shoplifting as an immediate boon to the disadvantaged, you equate ethics with outcomes. But if you yearn to outlaw shoplifting for the long-term benefit of the world, you equate ethics with principles. In this debate, it appears that the public has sided with the latter.
But most surprising, perhaps, is the absence in this debate of a third ethic — the care-based principle of the Golden Rule. What’s the impact of stealing on the shoplifters? How does it degrade their self-respect, harden their sentiments, and increase their distrust of others? Is that degradation what we desire to give them? The truly surprising thing about Rev. Jones’s proposition is that he’s calling on poor parishioners to surrender their dignity — one of the things they presumably go to church to find reaffirmed. Promoting shoplifting may make Rev. Jones feel better, but it neither creates a better world nor inhabits it with fully dignified people. That’s a hard price to pay for having a moral leader who gets his ethics so muddled.
©2010 Institute for Global Ethics
Find this and previous weeks’ commentaries online as a podcast titled Ethicast™ now available on iTunes. Subscribe today!
Print This Story
Email This Story
My first reaction to reading about Rev Jones admonishing the poor to shop-lift came in two parts: 1) as a man of the cloth, he seems totally uncommitted to guiding his parishioners to obey The Ten Commandments 2) he doesn’t believe in the power of prayer to help his flock find solutions to meet their needs. Did his own congregation have the commitment to reach out to their own in need? He is leading the way to moral bankruptcy.
You are absolutely spot on from an ethics point of view — at least for the people who have never felt real hunger.
The problem with the good pastor’s point is that there are many alternatives to stealing in our society.
But still, if I had no alternative and my children were starving (not just hungry) — NO alternative– I hope I am stating clearly — I would steal like a bandit. And so would any parent.
Here is a clear dilemma: is it OK to steal to save a life?
During my initial reading of this article I was beginning to wonder if a third ethic was going to be mentioned. I am so glad you did, finally, get to it. I think many of our problems stem from forgetting or leaving the care based principle behind altogether. It seems somehow today that we have gotten to the point of looking for very simple all inclusive solutions to complex problems. We have stopped asking the questions and doing the type of thinking that allows us to look at more complex solutions or a solution that involves a combination of solutions. In the process we have also left behind the kind of thinking that enables us to look beyond strict rules as the basis for morality and ethics to the underlying encompasing principles that should guide those rules and our behavior. Many would argue that this stems from our emphasis on respect for a “multicultural” approach to ethics and morality, but do we really have to leave the discussion and practice of deeper moral and ethical principles, as well as, thinking out in order to respect all cultural approaches to ethics?
This Jean Valjean dilemma is difficult to hang a label on. But, Immanuel Kant notwithstanding, all laws designed to protect what is ‘right’ and punish what is ‘wrong’ must be tempered with judgement. That is why we have people called “Judges”. The existence of Judges is proof that humans, somewhere back in time, properly concluded that nothing in this world is totally black or totally white.
There are no conditions set on “Thou shalt not steal.” There are no gray areas. It is a Commandment, not a guideline. My understanding of Christianity teaches that when “thou has been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things:” (Matthew 25:21). These “few things” certainly include the Ten Commandments, the most basic foundational tenents of Christianity; the “many things” include the whole spectrum of human needs. So as a leader in the Christian denomination, isn’t this man supposed to be showing his congregation how to be true to those few issues of faith that will give them the dominion they need over the trials of the human experience? Or to put it simply, isn’t his job to teach others how to put God first in their lives?
Then again, when he has already demonstrated such attention-seeking behavior, it’s clear that he has no intention of putting God first nor showing anyone else how to do so. His whole message is to put himself first, and to teach others the same. That is not only not Christian, it is disgraceful.