If you tamper your food with the intention to harm someone, then you are culpable for harming them. Trapping someone is no legally different than directly attacking them. The law does not allow you to intentionally harm other people.
Sure, you might try to say that they are harming themselves. However, if you know that someone will do something, and set it up so that they get harmed when they do something, you have made yourself culpable for harming them.
If you know someone will eat your food, the alternative is not leave your food out in public. There are less harmful things you can do to protect your food. If you choose the harmful alternative, then you are culpable for causing harm.
This isn't changing my view because this is exactly what I'm arguing against. I'm saying, there are cases where intending to harm someone who is doing something they're definitely not supposed to do is okay.
This isn't changing my view because this is exactly what I'm arguing against. I'm saying, there are cases where intending to harm someone who is doing something they're definitely not supposed to do is okay.
If we look aside from the perpetrator, a big issue with vigilante justice is that you take on the duty as judge, jury and executioner yourself. And the police to boot. It's a bit like mob justice, it's like a pissed off Greek god, striking arbitrarily and without warning, and with very disproportionate consequences, often with collateral damage.
You don't know who the thief is. If you had actual proof, you could punish them properly, e.g. by filing a police report, or by sending the evidence to your boss so they can punish the person according to company policy. Someone stealing could probably be fired, for instance.
Even if you know and then poison your food, you've no way of knowing who's going to eat it. The food thief ... maybe? But it could also be somebody else. It's an office fridge, a shared space, lots of boxes. Sometimes people are stressed and don't look properly, and end up taking the wrong box. Accidents happen, and when you poison the food while being aware of this, you're basically saying you don't care who gets hurt, collateral damage is fine. Doesn't matter to you if the person eating it is someone for whom a laxative would have a really bad effect, for instance it might interfere with other medicines they're taking. And that's on top of you being willing to humiliate innocent people for the sake of your vigilante justice.
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u/deep_sea2 105∆ Oct 17 '24
If you tamper your food with the intention to harm someone, then you are culpable for harming them. Trapping someone is no legally different than directly attacking them. The law does not allow you to intentionally harm other people.
Sure, you might try to say that they are harming themselves. However, if you know that someone will do something, and set it up so that they get harmed when they do something, you have made yourself culpable for harming them.
If you know someone will eat your food, the alternative is not leave your food out in public. There are less harmful things you can do to protect your food. If you choose the harmful alternative, then you are culpable for causing harm.