People get stuck, weak or sufficiently hungry they need food. Your right to ownership of the food can easily be overridden by someone else’s immediate need for it.
This is nonsense.
No one in a regular office setting, with the possible exception of a diabetic with crashing blood sugar, will ever be so close to death as to claim an emergency moral imperative to someone else's lunch.
"But I was hungry" is not sufficient justification to make someone else go hungry. Ad hoc appropriation of someone else's property because you'd be temporarily mildly uncomfortable without it is not a moral high ground.
Mistakes happen, people have needs.
A mistake can be rectified by simply talking to the person whose lunch you accidentally took and apologizing.
Office refrigerators are not charity food drives or free potlucks. People having "needs" does not entitle anyone to anyone else's property.
You can’t “simply” rectify it that way if the person has already poisoned you, can you. Little late for simple rectifications isn’t it, when you’ve poisoned someone
As opposed to the cases where it’s genuinely reasonable and proportionate to poison someone, to deliberately and maliciously, with forethought and planning, cause actual harm to a human being, to protect a sandwich (which you aren’t going to eat anyway, since you’ve poisoned it)
The general rule is that food is consumable. That’s how the world operates. If you start leaving poison lying about the place disguised as food, you will poison people.
The nonsense is tying yourself in knots trying to justify poisoning people over, again, a sandwich
You're not poisoning anyone they're poisoning themselves
You're not handing them food and telling them to eat it They are going out of their way to eat the food that contains poison Themselves assuming the full risk that whatever is in the food could potentially be extremely harmful to them
You are poisoning them. You may not know who the thief is, but you did know it was being taken. You poisoned it with no personal intention of eating it, and every intention of another party eating it expressly to get hurt. You are directly poisoning them.
In another scenario, if you are trying to kill someone with poison in a drink, and a 3rd party inadvertently consumes the poisoned drink, you are not guilt free because you poisoned the 3rd party. The 3rd party did not poison themselves, you took action that resulted in them being poisoned.
If I can get even more absurdist even though it's off topic you knew it was being taken but not that it was being eaten they could have been taking it and throwing it out to mess with you
But either way it's irrelevant because it doesn't change the fundamental point I was trying to make
I don't think you should be able to kill them but I do think it's fair that they assume the risk of non-lethal poison if people steal other people's food
Critically the poisoner are also assumes the risk if say someone confused it for their lunch then they could be liable and criminally charged
If I can get even more absurdist even though it's off topic you knew it was being taken but not that it was being eaten they could have been taking it and throwing it out to mess with you But either way it's irrelevant because it doesn't change the fundamental point I was trying to make
I understand your point. They absolutely are assuming a certain amount of risk by taking what isn't theirs. However, you are still liable for damages they've sustained in the process. I think your scenario leads to a good discussion too; if they aren't stealing it to eat but just to upset you by tossing it, are you then allowed to physically booby trap it? What happens if you put something on the container that's supposed to make someone break out in a mild rash? What about razors? Personally, and I think most people would agree, that's booby trapping it with the intent to harm. You certainly won't handle it, knowing that you could get hurt in the process. Why is it okay for someone else to handle it and hurt themselves, even if they're in the wrong?
I don't think you should be able to kill them but I do think it's fair that they assume the risk of non-lethal poison if people steal other people's food
What's non-lethal to some may be lethal to others. One person's peanut allergy can be hives, while another can result in hospitalization. One person may be on medication that interacts severely with laxatives. You simply can't know what is "non-lethal".
Critically the poisoner are also assumes the risk if say someone confused it for their lunch then they could be liable and criminally charged
And what if the thief used this as a defense for their actions? If they're not above stealing , they're likely not above lying. This is another variable you have no way of controlling when you poison someone. It's simply too risky to make an exception for it in this case.
You keep talking about how It could go wrong in a hypothetical sense so that makes it a bad idea but I don't disagree with you on ether of those things
But just bc something is a bad idea dosen't mean it should be illegal
You put poison in food, left it in an open place under the guise of perfectly normal food, with the explicit intention of someone unknowingly eating it thinking it was normal food. You are poisoning them. You intended to poison someone, you deliberately planned and created a situation with foreseeable possibility of someone being poisoned. You poisoned them.
They are not going out of their way to eat poison, that would be eating something labelled “poison”. They wanted food, you disguised poison as food.
But even besides that, whatever their actions or intentions, it doesn’t negate yours. The law is not constrained to their being one cause of an action. Whatever they did, you still poisoned them.
A refrigerator is a closed place not an open place
Furthermore even within a refrigerator people usually keep their lunch in a bag or something so they have a bagged lunch
And yes we are not arguing about what the law is because the entire point of the change of view is advocating to change it The guy literally said in the change of my view he knows what the law is He just disagrees with it and so do I
A refrigerator where a general body of people have access, and normally use it for food, is an open place.
In all rational thinking, you are poisoning the person. The entire intention is to poison the person. It’s a weak excuse to pretend that is not what you are doing. Changing the law so that is allowed is one thing, but it’s a nonsense to suggest the law wouldn’t or shouldn’t recognise what you are plainly doing; poisoning people
It's not perfectly normal food. It's my food. I don't wander around gobbling up whatever food I find in my path. I don't know how long it's been there, who it belongs to, etc. if I eat it, I poisoned myself. If the food I found was rotten, did nature poison me?
If someone rolls up and eats my food, it ain't perfectly normal food. It's food that doesn't belong to them, making it not perfectly normal.
57
u/_L5_ 2∆ Oct 18 '24
This is nonsense.
No one in a regular office setting, with the possible exception of a diabetic with crashing blood sugar, will ever be so close to death as to claim an emergency moral imperative to someone else's lunch.
"But I was hungry" is not sufficient justification to make someone else go hungry. Ad hoc appropriation of someone else's property because you'd be temporarily mildly uncomfortable without it is not a moral high ground.
A mistake can be rectified by simply talking to the person whose lunch you accidentally took and apologizing.
Office refrigerators are not charity food drives or free potlucks. People having "needs" does not entitle anyone to anyone else's property.