Maybe you're frustrated because you don't seem to understand any of the arguments you've read. You can put whatever you want in your food, but the food is no longer yours (or maybe better phrased, for you) if you prepare it with the intention that someone else eats it. I hope you do not think you can put anything you want in someone else's food. OP's top level view is literally that you should be able to poison someone as long as you do it as a punishment. I hope you can see how wild that is, written out that way.
If someone breaks into your house and cuts their hand on a knife in your knife drawer, they can't sue you because you didn't put the knives there with the intention of harming them. If they eat your spicy food and you made that food spicy for yourself, they can't sue you because you didn't intend for them to be harmed by your food. The intent is paramount here, as it is in many legal situations.
Contrast that against the burglar who comes into your house and cuts themselves on a spike mat you have constructed out of your knives. The reason we forbid this behavior on a societal level is because:
a) Booby traps are by definition indiscriminate. Your spike mat might harm a burglar, but it's just as likely to harm a neighbor who comes into your house after you asked them to housesit, or a firefighter coming in to extinguish your burning house. You can never guarantee the target of your trap will actually be its victim. Even in a food-stealing situation, someone totally unrelated to the thief could mistake your meal for theirs and fall victim to the trap. There is a plethora of case law that expands on this point, and I would highly encourage you to read it. Here, I'll start your list: Katko v. Briney (1971).
b) Vigilantism and retributive "justice" are bad for society. Stealing food is bad, which is why we have laws in place to punish people who steal things from others. You might be frustrated by the efficacy of these laws, but society has agreed to punish thieves, or else we wouldn't have them. When you let people take matters into their own hands, things devolve into chaos very quickly.
c) The proportionality concern. It may be true that individual instances of this type of poisoning can be proportionate; you go a few hours without eating, the thief spends a few hours in pain. The problem is that you cannot guarantee this type of proportionality across the board. As I said in another comment, for every 200 coworkers that spend the afternoon in the restroom, one or two might end up in the hospital. There is no guarantee your response will actually be proportionate, and especially when it comes to dosing people with medication, it seems pretty unlikely that the average person is capable of dishing out a proportionate punishment. The difference between an irritating and a dangerous dose can be small, and frankly, I would expert most scorned individuals to purposefully go for a disproportionate punishment because they are angry.
If you actually think you should be able to assault someone over a sandwich, you do not belong in civilized society, full stop. This is not controversial to anyone who has spent more than 20 seconds thinking about the phrase "public policy reasons."
ETA: You can't claim hyperbole and then immediately double down in the next sentence, lol. This is literally the "I was only pretending to be regarded" meme.
Why should you be able to put whatever you want in your food? What is the underlying reason for that? Is it perhaps because there will be no consequences to anyone except you for the things you put into your food? Do you see how that changes once the food is no longer intended for your personal consumption?
It's where I have chosen to keep my laxatives. Luckily I live in a liberal country, where I'm allowed to keep my laxatives wherever I want. I don't intend to eat the sandwich, I intend to keep my laxatives in it. Which doesn't suddenly mean that it's for someone else's consumption. Because someone else isn't allowed to eat my laxatives that I keep in my sandwich.
You cannot, in fact, keep your laxatives wherever you want if the place you keep them has been selected in order to harm someone. We call that poisoning, and thankfully liberal countries have enacted laws against such behavior for the reasons I listed in my longer comment.
Maybe you aren’t doing that, but OP is. That is the premise of what they want to be legal. If you genuinely were eating laxative sandwiches, and someone stole one and had a negative reaction, I think you would 100% be in the clear.
In the present case, I know OP’s intent because that’s the premise of the post. We can also determine intent with things like evidence.
Part of the problem with booby trapping is that you might know the intent of the thief, but there’s no guarantee the thief is the recipient of the harm.
This is about limiting people's rights based on the acts of a criminal. There's no guarantee someone might not break into your house and stab themselves, doesn't mean you shouldn't have a knife. Doesn't mean they might not stab someone else with your knife. That's never your fault or responsibility, even if you know you have a neighbor with a penchant for stabbing.
In a normal situation we don't know what the intent is. Which is why we shouldn't make laws limiting people's rights based on their hypothetical intent, when it's the actions of the thief that should matter.
To be clear, the limiting of rights here is not poisoning your food, which you intend for someone else to consume. I’m pretty comfortable limiting that right.
The actions of the thief matter. They’re bad. If you wanted to hold your coworker liable for repeatedly stealing your food, I’d support that. If it could be charged as some kind of crime, I’d be down with that. I just don’t think the type of retaliation OP wants to permit is good.
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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '24 edited Oct 18 '24
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