Quote:
Originally Posted by Lo Zeno
Oh for xxxx's sake!
Stealing: taking something which you are not allowed to take.
This, at least, is what stealing means at my home.
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I really cannot believe that people can be
so brainless.
It seems that abstract reasoning is futile when emotions take over reasoning, so let's give an example. At my home, when my son takes my dictionary without being allowed to, he is certainly not
stealing my dictionary. He is just using it without my permission. It may happen that I actually need that dictionary and go searching for it, only to find it on his desk and maybe I am even furious because of that, but there's no way I can call this stealing.
Mind this was an example where a person physically takes my book away from me (causing temporary deprivation) and even then it is not stealing.
So, stealing certainly
does not mean "taking something which you are not allowed to take".
An adequate definition of stealing must include both taking away something that causes permanent deprivation and an actual intention to deprive the owner of that object. It is easy to give many other situations when someone takes away your property without your consent and this is not considered theft either in legal or ethical terms. For example, if you left your book on the bus or train, would you say it must remain there forever or any person that removes it is considered a thief? Or a means of transport is urgently needed (for example, because of some natural disaster) and somebody takes my car without my permission to save their life. This also would not be considered theft in most legal systems and probably in all ethical systems, since sustaining/rescuing life is a higher value than guarding private property.
Incidentally, when my camera was stolen from me (physically taken by somebody out of my pocket on a crowded tram) in Rome, the Italian Police tried to convince me this was actually something normal there and that I shouldn't even expect them to accept a notification / write a report. So maybe I am entirely wrong and in Italy taking something from somebody is always considered theft, but at the same time theft is accepted as normal behavior even by the police
