Post-lunch stupor writing. Yesterday I went to a concert by C Mari, it was full of youngsters less than half my age. I enjoyed myself but little else to write about so I'll go back to the memory vault to write about the past rather than the present.
The neighborhood where I grew up in Toronto was called Thornhill, we moved there from Montreal when I was two years old. I have not recollection of Montreal, and we left Thornhill for Mexico when I was nearly six years old, so this acts like a bookmark in my early life (pre and post-Canada).
There is one event from this period which I remember very well. My aunt (who is my mother's sister) lived with my uncle (who is my father's brother) in a room in our home. They weren't married yet (gasp!) and my dad and uncle worked for the same company.
Once day I entered their room and rummaged through their drawers. Inside, I found a $50 dollar bill and took it to the nearest convenience store and bought lots of candy and a kite. I remember the attendant asking me how was it that I was carrying to much money, and I told her that I had saved my allowance for a long time. She laughed and charged me. When I saw that I had a lot of change I bought even more stuff.
Then I went to the park and gave out candy to my neighbors. It must have alerted one of the parents there because someone ratted me out and my parents met me at the park. They asked me where I got that candy, at the store I said, and how did you get the money? I said that I had found it on the floor. Where? And I took them around the park pointing at places where I had found bills of different denominations (which surely didn't add up to $50, or even were real bill denominations). Their interrogation was better than my lying, and finally I broke down and confessed my crime.
I remember being grounded and my allowance being used to "repay" what I stole. Decades later I reminded my uncle and my aunt about this event. My uncle got mad, not at me but at my dad, because my dad refused to repay what I stole, "it's your fault for misplacing your money" he said. I was angry too, my dad took away my allowance and didn't even repay my uncle! Though, honestly I think it would have taken me about a year to repay it and that probably didn't happen.
My parents made a huge emphasis on the importance of honesty. I used to roll my eyes when my father used to say "you start with x and you end up robbing banks", which I don't think is technically true, but stealing is indeed a slippery slope from which all sorts of moral sloppiness branches out (lying, cheating, concealing). I'm glad I received this instruction and example, I've seen some people seemingly struggle to do the right thing whereas I don't even consider the option.
Decades later I had a girlfriend and we went to visit a couple who were friends of her in Galicia. The guy worked as an optometrist and complained that a person had arrived to the store where he worked and asked to see a case of sunglasses. Then they said they wanted to look at something else, and as this guy turned around, the customer put the case in their bag without him noticing. His partner said "but you're not going to have to pay for it, are you?" and he said "well, it's going to be missing from the inventory so I'm supposed to pay for it, but there's some stuff which is not inventoried, I'll repay myself over time". To me this seemed to be a reasonable answer to an unreasonable policy, even though I would have probably cut my losses and make sure nobody stole from me again. However, she said "what? not inventoried? you should have started taking that money a long time ago, they're exploiting you yadda yadda". He rolled his eyes as if this were a pattern of conversation he was tired of arguing about.
I think that it's easy to fall down the slippery slope if you start justifying why you steal, and yet there might be some very good reasons for doing it. I remember a moral reasoning exercise, ChatGPT says it's Kohlberg’s Heinz dilemma:
A woman is near death from a special kind of cancer. There’s one drug that doctors believe might save her — a form of radium discovered by a local pharmacist. The drug is expensive to produce, but the pharmacist is charging ten times what it costs him to make it. He paid $200 for the radium and is selling the drug for $2,000 per dose.
The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, goes to everyone he knows to borrow money, but he can only raise about $1,000 — half of what’s needed. He tells the pharmacist his wife is dying and asks if he can buy the drug cheaper, or pay later. The pharmacist refuses, saying, “I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.” Desperate, Heinz breaks into the pharmacy to steal the drug for his wife.
Should Heinz have stolen the drug? Why or why not?
State your opinion and then self-assess your moral stage of development.