What is your opinion of looting?

[Alan]

Hi,

What is your opinion of looting? Do you think that people have the right to help themselves to items that have been thrown out into a public place as the result of a natural incident like an earthquake or flood? I'm thinking of the incident at the moment where people are helping themselves to expensive parts of cars/motorbikes and other things that were in boxes and have landed up on the beach in a bay on the south coast of England. The boxes have been washed ashore from a container ship that has gone aground there.

Alan
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[prezbucky]

I think that beyond the appropriation of necessities (food, water, clothing, medicine as necessary...), looting is wrong.

We saw this during Katrina -- some people getting what they needed, while others were seen leaving shops with things like TVs, computers, stereos and stereo equipment, etc.

Abject situation or not, stealing is still stealing.

What happens when the business owners come back to their shops and find that they no longer have inventory... and have (thus) lost so much that they must go out of business?

What happens is that people lose their jobs, consumers lose vendors (ultimately, choice), and suppliers/wholesalers/manufacturers lose customers.
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[Torsten]

I agree with Tom, looting is tantamount to stealing. If you find something that you know is not yours and you take it, you might possess it but you don't own it. Consequently, you will always have an ill feeling wondering what the real owners might be thinking now.
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[prezbucky]

Most of us would feel some guilt (outside of a loot-or-die situation... and even then there might be some latent guilt), Torsten, but I think some people never learn that stealing is wrong -- whether from a natural lack of empathy (nature -- antisocial personality disorder) or never being taught that stealing is wrong (nurture).

Abnormal psych is cool. Here's some info on antisocial personality disorder. In its acute form, it becomes sociopathy/psychopathy.

Psychosis (as it applies to psychotic people) refers to a severe brain problem affecting behavior/senses (etc -- psychological stuff). Sufferers of the various guises of schizophrenia, for instance, suffer psychoses. Someone is psychotic when he/she is suffering an acute attack (psychosis).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder
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[Fan of Arabian horses]

From what I know, formerly it was a part of sea-law that anybody who found a stranded good was allowed to keep it hold and even if a captain of a ship found an uncrewed ship in the open sea he was allowed to take possession of it.

Of course, as I?m a landlubber I don?t know about the nowadays laws regarding that.

Michael

[prezbucky]

That's an interesting topic, Michael. If I'm not mistaken, at least some of that still holds today: if you find it in the open sea (outside of any single country's jurisdiction, anyway), maybe you can keep it.
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