The Fine Art of Morally Responsible Looting
Events in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have caused me to wonder about the moral issues involved when society has broken down as they seem to have done in this case.
News cameras showed looters entering stores and cleaning the places out.
A cry went out to shoot the looters. This seemed an appropriate way to bring back order and to create a civilized society where rescue workers could get their work done. Looters were immoral scum that deserved no consideration. Those who lost their lives would have been sacrificed to teach a lesson to those who would then think twice about looting.
However, we then heard that there were shortages of food and water. Some people needed ice to keep insulin supplies cold since the electricity has failed. Others need prescription drugs from pharmacies that were closed as the owners and employees made their way out of town.
Does morality require that these people lay there and die when food and water is just a few feet away? Do we shoot these people as looters?
The people taking clothes and appliances are not people who are fighting for their survival. They are people seeking to make their lives better and who do not care that the lives of others are made worse as a result. They care only about themselves. There is no moral defense for these people, and nothing that I will write should be interpreted as offering any.
If anybody was to try to defend this behavior by saying, “Everybody does it,” their defense would fail. First, because it is not the case that everybody does it. Second, because morality is not concerned with what everybody does, but with what everybody should do.
This essay concerns those who took what they needed to survive - food, water, shelter, and medicine, in a situation where the normal mechanisms for purchasing what they need had broken down.
What To Do
If you find yourself in this situation, here is what you should do.
You go to the place where you can get the supplies that you need. You take the supplies — the food, water, and medical supplies to sustain you.
If possible, you leave a note giving your name, identifying what you took, and identifying any property that you damaged in order to get it, and you leave it in a conspicuous place at the store. However, the obligation to repay the debt does not depend on the owner’s ability to find the note. This is just a way of showing honorable intentions, and not necessarily the only way or even, in some circumstances, the best way.
After the emergency has passed, you visit the store owner and report that you would like to settle your tab. You cover the costs. You, perhaps, offer the owner some compensation for the additional hassle that your actions caused. The issue is then closed.
In addition, I would like to recommend, if you have a camera of any type, that you use it to take pictures of actual looters. Try to take care to get a good shot at their face so that they can be identified, and take the pictures in such a way that it is possible to determine which store the individual looted. Turn the pictures over to your local law enforcement agencies. The law enforcement agencies should then set up a team that uses the tools at its disposal - including websites where citizens can view the pictures and identify the culprits. Those looters that can be identified should then be prosecuted.
Anybody identified as a possible looter should be allowed to defend himself by revealing that he left a note in which he left his name, what he took, and what he damaged along the way. If this is the case, and if the goods he took were necessary, then he should be held liable for those costs only.
For any looters who made no attempts to respect the rights of the owner of the property they took, they should still be given an opportunity to return to the owner and make good on what they took. A general amnesty, perhaps, would be appropriate, simply because some people act in the heat of passion without thought. The morally responsible person who finds that he acted rashly will take an inventory of what he took, and from where he took it, while it is fresh in his mind, with every intention of either returning the merchandise or paying for it when the opportunity arises.
Anybody who does not do these things so should feel a twinge of guilt and shame the next time a thief or a robber goes to prison, because he is no different and deserves no less for himself. If he reads about somebody standing trial in the community, or sits on a jury with the fate of an accused thief in his hands, he should note that whatever contempt he holds for the thief, he should hold for himself as well, because he is no better. If he hears of a friend who has had something stolen, or if some property of his should be taken from him, the hatred he may feel for those who harmed him or those he cares about is no different than the hatred he deserves for his own actions.
All of this is illustrated by the fact that if the law enforcement agencies, after a period of amnesty has ended, can identify him as a looter, he should be arrested himself, and tried, and made the object of the same contempt that he would feel towards anybody that took his property.
Extenuating Circumstances
The idea that people have a moral permission to take property that is not theirs under emergency conditions, as long as they compensate the rightful owners, is not new or unique to events like those in New Orleans.
Let us assume that a father and his child are out fishing on a remote mountain stream. The child gets stung by a bee and quickly develops the symptoms of an allergic reaction. The child must get to a hospital immediately. The father’s car won’t start. However, another fisherman has parked his car nearby. The keys are in the ignition, but the owner is not to be seen. The child is dying.
We do not condemn the father for using the car to take his child to the hospital. We should not do so — any caring father would do the same thing. However, we do hold the father responsible for compensating the owner of the car for any loss or inconvenience. He covers the cost of the gasoline and any other expense. He should even offer the owner extra compensation for the owner’s inconvenience (though the owner of the car, seeing that this was a genuine emergency, would have the option to refuse the offer). The father is not obligated to watch his child die simply because the only way he can keep his child alive involves using somebody else’s property.
Similarly, a hiker lost in the mountains when a storm comes may find a cabin. Let us assume that it is locked and the owners are not home. So, he breaks in, lights a fire to keep out the chill. He has an obligation to do as little damage as possible to the home, and use only what he needs. He has an obligation to compensate the owners for any cost, and perhaps a little extra. He is not required to sit outside on the porch and die of exposure simply because the cabin is not his and the owner is not available to invite him in.
Truly an Emergency
One danger with this type of moral permission is that people might use it too liberally. Society requires that each person be secure in their homes and their property, and that extraordinary circumstances are required before an agent is justified in using the property of another without consent. The child dying from the bee sting, the hiker at risk of exposure, the family stranded in a flooding city because an elderly parent cannot be moved from the home, these are extraordinary circumstances.
Furthermore, we can reasonably hold that individuals have an obligation to prevent such an emergency from arising. If the individual’s negligence is a cause of the emergency, he can still be held in moral contempt, not necessarily because he looted to save himself, but because he put himself in a situation where he looting was his only chance of survival.
Waste
One of the arguments that a person may use to justify looting is that “It will only go to waste.” The looter tells himself, “The flood waters are rising. They are going to destroy all of this electronic equipment. Certainly, it is better that I get to enjoy the benefits of this equipment then that it turn into a pile of electronic junk in this store.”
Another argument may be, “The items I do not loot will simply be taken by others. My decision not to steal will not prevent the store owner from suffering a loss. Rather, the person who profits from my refusal is some (other) thief who takes the property that I leave behind.”
People have an amazing capacity to come up with excuses that will make their wrong actions appear, at least in their own mind, to be right. Regardless of whether the property is destroyed, or whether some other thief will get what the honest person leaves untouched, these cannot make the theft right. There is still the basic fact that the property belongs to somebody else. It is not permissible to walk into a person’s summer home and start using it because the owner is a way. Similarly, it is not permissible to take somebody’s wallet on the grounds that he left it on the counter or dropped it on a bench where some less honorable person could grab it and walk away.
Somebody might be able to make a case for taking property that will otherwise be destroyed and place it somewhere for safe keeping. However, that property still belongs to the original owner and must be returned to him at the earliest convenience, in the same condition it was in when taken (to whatever degree is possible). Perhaps the owner will offer a reward as a way of encouraging others to save his property that would otherwise be destroyed. Whether he does or not, the property is still his.
Summary
This article does not offer legal advice. This is an article that describes the moral landscape. Unjust laws exist. They may punish a person who engages in morally responsible looting.
Morality tells us how the laws should be written, it does not tell us what the laws actually are. Mostly, if we want our own goods to be protected, we are advised to help in the protection of that which belongs to others. This means not only refusing to take that which belongs to others, but by at least refusing to aid those who harm others and, at most, making an effort to see that they do not get away with immoral actions.
One should be as interested in helping the store owner who is suffering from the actions of looters that one would want the store owner to be in preventing thieves from entering one’s own property.
In a crisis, lives are put at risk. Lives are more valuable than rights to property. The obligation not to use the property of another person without consent does not extend to the point that one has an obligation to die, or watch one’s children or others die, in extraordinary circumstances where life is at risk and the normal procedures for saving life are no longer available.
In these rare circumstances, there is a fine art of morally responsible looting.
I obtained useful feedback on an earlier draft of this article that I posted on the Internet Infidels discussion board.