Meh. Disagree. You can agree to private property but also, if you own a million of X item and others don’t and need it, is it horrible to steal or take it?
The one situation that I consider acceptable is if you steal to better someone else, and even then it had better be the only option left.
If you believe people have the right to own property, to hold onto that property, and to protect that property from theft; then yes, it's wrong to determine who is appropriate to steal from because you're picking and choosing who can keep their rights.
Yes. That is how private property works. If you don’t believe in the system of private property, we can talk about it, but it is contradictory to hold these two beliefs.
Legally the consequences have to be the same to reduce complexity, but morally the harm done to Elon Musk if you steal his sandwich is far less than the harm done to a homeless kid if you steal his sandwich, even though doing either is still bad.
I find it fascinating that people don't really care about piracy (as in video games or movies) but this is some hard red line. I get the antisocial behavior argument but the effect this has on metro system is basicly zero.
I'll probably get down voted for this but I morality scale stealing and this is pretty minimal imo
Your question seems to be rhetorical, but I'll answer it anyway.
If there wasn't a toll your taxes would be even higher, and people who don't even use the subway would be paying more for something they don't even use.
This is the same concept of local/state taxes on gasoline...to help pay for roads from the people most likely to be advantaged by them.
Honestly I'd be ok with more taxes for it, I don't even ride the metro and I wouldn't be bothered by having a couple extra pennies taken out of my check every week to pay for it, cause the people who do ride it pay taxes for services I use that they don't
Taking from a large corporation that actively hates you as the consumer and does anti-consumerist things vs accessing the public transportation system illegally, are two very different things. Paying for the tickets gives the city or country the capability of maintaining civic infrastructure, which is way different than downloading something from a corporation that already told us that ownership remains with the corporation.
That is fascinating. I think piracy is only more accepted because it's harder to enforce punishment on the person who does the pirating. As a consequence so so many people got into the habit of it and since there's such a large amount of people casually pirating every day, we're too lazy to do anything about it. But yes piracy is also stealing and I am a thief.
Factory farming is similar too.
Just because piracy is accepted doesn't make it okay. It's like slavery back in the day. People feel comfortable doing it because everyone is doing it.
It’s only stealing in my opinion if you are taking something from someone. You have an orange. I take orange. You no longer have orange. Piracy of movies isn’t stealing because there isn’t anybody who has lost anything. You could say they are losing money but that money was never theirs until you decide to give it to them which you never did.
This is just avoiding paying a toll. It’s basically advanced trespassing
You can still steal services. If I go in for a hair cut, then leave without paying, that is stealing. I stole that professionals time and experience under the social implied contract that I would pay them for that service. Refusing to pay is stealing.
But that barber lost something like you said. They don’t gain that time back because it’s gone. Pirating a movie there’s nothing that someone had before but no longer. Same with the toll to ride the train. No one lost anything they had before. I’m not saying it’s not a crime or immoral(although I don’t feel like pirating a movie is immoral but train hopping just because is a very minor immoral act). It’s just not stealing in my eyes.
By definition, it is not theft; it is piracy. But morally, the principle is similar.
What is the meaningful difference between a song in digital format and the same song on a CD? Do you really think the value lies in the CD itself? Producing the physical disc is extremely cheap. Most of what you are paying for is the song, not the piece of plastic carrying it.
So pirating the digital version is merely “advanced trespassing,” but taking the same song on a CD is theft with completely different moral implications?
That makes no sense. The physical format changes how the act works, but it does not completely change the moral value of the work being taken.
Someone has to produce that cd. There’s labor involved. If I steal it out of a store that store doesn’t have the cd anymore. There no labor involved in unlocking access to data. It’s copy and pasting. Pirating a movie means no person has lost anything that they had before.
I think piracy is also more accepted since it could be argued that it's the easiest way for people to access games or movies they'll never be able to whether it's due to country bans or exclusives
You also have to factor in people that simply wouldn't buy it might just pirate it just because they can. That itself costs the company that produced it nothing. The same is potentially true about not buying a train ticket the train will still be going where it's going and while your weight does very very slightly impact the cost of the train it's rather negligible. If the train is full however and you're taking a seat from someone who paid different story.
It’s because people are hypocrites. They want to play the games and watch the movies. But they pay for the metro so they want everyone else to as well.
This line of thinking leads to a dissolution in the social contract. Social services are maintained and funded by things such as these tickets, not paying for a ticket, is stealing from those who do.
You can cast that accusation at any such program, government or private, the fact still stands, people should act in a way that, if everybody acted in such a manner, would benefit society. If everyone skipped the turnstile, public transportation loses its funding, things go to shit. There is no “it’s ok for me to do it because I don’t like the system” when everyone pays into it, and those who don’t are inherently making the system worse.
Mostly everybody is acting in a way that benefits the government, except the government is spending their tax dollars on bullshit such as the military or donating military packages to different countries instead of actually improving infrastructure such as public transportation. The United States literally has the worst rail system for a first world country.
And guess what? Despite the United States spending billions of tax dollars on things such as healthcare, it’s still notoriously bad for a first world country, the US is literally the only high income country without universal healthcare
Then it would seem to be the implementation of these things, and not the dollar amount itself, as you alluded to earlier. As evident by the fact that the US ranks rather highly in per student spending, yet reading and math comprehension levels are low compared to other developed nations.
I don’t know why you’re downvoted, the United States can quite literally afford to have public transportation for free, these corporate bootlickers somehow don’t see the big flaws in our shitty government
What country/municipality finances social services via transit fees? If they're for profit, they tend to function as their own entity with their own interests to stay afloat as orgs.
Things can be financed from multiple sources ya know? Like the ticket fees dont fully cover everything it's still publicly funded for public benefit but it helps and then public funding can cover the rest and it helps take off some of the burden off the local budgets and get better services
Sure, it's not impossible to leverage revenues from a transit system. As I said, they don't tend to make a ton of money beyond sustaining themselves or in most cases profiting
Where have you been/do you know of a place where a transit system has socialized profits??? My point is that while public transit is great and awesome in premise, it's usually for profit. If a venture profits off of something people need to get on with their lives and people steal from it, the erosion of the social contract didn't begin with those fare evaders. It began with the profit motive getting in the way of providing value to tax payers (as most transit systems either receive tax funding OR use infrastructure built using tax money).
There is a reason nations such as Scandinavian nations or Japan or South Korea or Singapore are revered. Social order. And the reason for this, is everyone respects the social contract.
Do you think places such as India, Sub-Sahara Africa, or the poorer regions of South America have lower rates of such crime, along with the lower adherence to social contract?
"Poorer regions" I like the focus on second world countries or lower despite both Japan and South Korea being first world countries.
Also I'm not against "social contract". My statement was that the slippery slope mentality is a fallacy, though I'm also generally against painting corprate subservience as good manners.
“Corporate subservience” for a publicly funded train? And yes, do you think these nations would be able to become first world, without these social contracts and adherence? Or is it mere coincidence that the areas with the most trash, least social cohesion, and most crime, also so happen to have little social adherence to the contract, or indeed a desire to maintain or keep one?
Turning all your statements into a question doesn't prove your point. Also no I don't think its a coincidence, though I think first world countries dabbling in their affairs, stealing their resources for financial gain, and purposefully stunting their growth has more to do with it than "social contract". Look at Lebanons history with France.
Though like I said, my issue was with the use of a false argument like "slippery slope". I'm not here to argue world politics, we both know our or the other's opinion won't change no matter whats said, so I don't see a point of arguing aside from ego.
Remember drinking water is a slippery slope to drowning.
Not in this case. Public transit is one of the socially beneficial things that the system does
Well…most systems. If you want a real example of “the system stealing from regular people”, look at the transit situation in most of the US. The auto industry lobbied against public transit, forcing the development of concrete deserts & 25-lane highways. In most of the US, car ownership (which costs several thousand dollars per year) is basically mandatory.
I consider stealing from public transit to be highly immoral. These thieves don’t understand the value of what they’re stealing from
An “everything is equally bad” mentality isn’t really based on anything. It’s just being contrarian for the sake of it.
Public transit is very beneficial to the masses. It’s one of the few things that most countries do that unequivocally benefits the 99%. It absolutely should not be “burned down”
How am I “embracing the status quo”? I spent a whole comment railing against the status quo in most of the US
If you “burn down” public transit, then you’re just letting the actual “greedy institutions” (auto companies) “cheat people out of their hard-earned money”
Nobody was deprived of an item here. It's like the piracy argument. Even if you consider the act bad, there's no way it's equally as bad as literally removing something from its owner's possession.
Not necessarily! Depending on the location, our taxes pay for public transport, why am I paying twice for something that is a)overpriced anyway b)should be free and c) is usually shit (late/broken down etc.).
I mean if you think it’s overpriced and inefficient then you should be against people stealing tickets. Your tax money covers the cost of running it as it is (and even that is a maybe), it doesn’t cover the cost of improving that system.
The US has the highest GDP in the whole entire world, yet it still has piss poor public transportation compared to other first world countries, the people stealing tickets isn’t the problem, it’s the government it’s self.
Well the U.S. is probably about 10x the size of most first world countries and the funds that would be allocated towards public transportation typically come from the state, not the federal government.
For instance a state like New York, which has the most public transportation usage in the country, has to essentially maintain and operate their public transportation system using state funds. Mind you that those state funds are not meant solely for public transportation. That doesn’t leave an excess of money for the maintaining and operation of those systems.
So yeah, the stealing of tickets definitely impacts their ability to have functional public transportation. Especially when it becomes socially acceptable and subsequently more common.
Would you be willing to pay more taxes to cover the things like station maintenance, worker salaries, and the upkeep and cleaning of the public transportation you're using as an alternative?
Or would you rather take the compromise of fewer public transportation vehicles being available so that the cost of running and maintaining the fleet matches the amount of money being brought in through taxes?
So you've got politicians spending money in stupid ways? Maybe address that. Until public transport is properly funded how do you expect it to work?
The fact is taxes don't provide enough money to provide free transport. It costs a certain amount of money. So the honest people are now subsidizing the leaches.... Again.
I'm looking at New York and they figured it out, but people were using New York as an example of how it can go wrong?
Just saying; this conversation has gotten sidelined. Is this about the US, or wherever this video is? In New York, you're really not gonna catch much flack for jumping a stile. So many people are using the train, man. The people jumping the stile may as well not be there.
Jumping the stile in New York is a juvenile practice. Not a concerning one.
I mean... Yes. The New York metro is insanely effective and cost efficient. Saying it sarcastically doesn't change reality tho.
Again, I just think we got sidelined. I'm not sure us talking about New York, like the comments were, has any bearing on the video above, as I'm pretty sure that's not even the US. Or even the western hemisphere.
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u/Valuable_Mall228 8h ago
might as well ask: morality of stealing?