Investigators recovered two stolen trailers carrying $1.3 million in data center supplies, including copper wire and infrastructure equipment.
Investigators recovered two stolen trailers carrying $1.3 million in data center supplies, including copper wire and infrastructure equipment.
Amazing that your ‘gotcha’ is just two false statements.
Theft isn’t wrong regardless of the victim - it’s nuanced, just like all crime. That’s why we have very complicated legal processes to determine guilt and appropriate punishments.
Our morals don’t change depending on whether we like the target - it’s that our judgments are based on context.
The cool thing about ethics, morals, principles, etc… They’re all made up. We invented them. They have no objectivity (as far as we know) and therefore can and have changed based on our feelings. “Ethics” is just humans agreeing to do things a certain way because it makes us feel good, or doing things the other way makes us feel bad. There is no objective truth to it that you can so easily plug in a problem and get an objective answer.
Or is the world you want to live in just completely binary? No room for nuance?
Wow. That is a lot of words for someone to say they have no clue what they are talking about.
Why is Lemmy like this?
There is no established consensus that subjective morality is correct over objective morality, or vice versa. Both are philosophical positions that have been debated for centuries. Acting as though one side has already been proven correct is not an argument.
The point remains simple: stealing property that does not belong to you is wrong. It does not matter whether the owner is a person, a corporation, a political group, or an organization you dislike. The act itself does not magically become moral because you disagree with the person who owns the property.
The same applies to murder. Killing someone does not stop being murder because the person is considered immoral. If I killed Adolf Hitler before his crimes were committed, it would still be murder unless there was a legitimate justification for doing so. The morality of an action cannot be determined solely by how much we dislike the target.
Are there circumstances where people may feel justified stealing materials from AI data center construction sites? Maybe. Context matters. What does not change is that the law recognizes it as theft, and theft has traditionally been considered immoral because it involves taking something that belongs to someone else through force, coercion, or deception.
The criminal justice system already accounts for circumstances. It recognizes different levels of severity, intent, and harm. That has never been the argument.
The issue is the blatant inconsistency I see on this platform. Some actions are condemned as immoral when they happen to people or organizations that the community supports, while those same actions are suddenly justified when the target is politically unpopular.
You do not get to have a moral framework that changes depending on who benefits from the outcome. If theft is wrong, it is wrong regardless of whether the victim is someone you like or someone you dislike.
There is a reason Lady Justice is blindfolded while holding a balance. Justice is supposed to be applied equally, not based on personal preference, ideology, or who people think deserves it.
I do, though, is the thing. As does all of society. We always have and we always will. And you’re lying to yourself if you think you don’t take advantage of that flexibility yourself.
So in other words… There’s nuance. It’s not just how much we dislike the target, there’s other stuff to consider too. We need
Context 😲
You’re equivocating between two different questions: whether an act is justified and what the act is.
Yes, context matters when determining whether an action is morally or legally justified. Self-defense, necessity, and defense of others are all examples. I have never argued otherwise.
What I’ve been arguing is that context does not redefine the underlying act itself. If someone intentionally takes property without permission, that’s theft. It may be justified theft, just as killing in self-defense is still killing and, in many legal systems, would technically satisfy the actus reus of homicide while being legally excused or justified.
That’s why “a starving person stealing bread” is a classic moral dilemma. It’s compelling precisely because it’s still theft, even if most people agree it’s morally justified.
So when people celebrate the theft of construction materials simply because they dislike AI data centers, they’re making a moral argument, not changing the definition of theft. If they want to say, “I think this theft is justified,” that’s a coherent position. Saying “it’s not theft because I approve of it” is not.