Ah, He's Back!

I Had Hoped to Show a Dialogue I Had on Morals the Other Day · Ah, He's Back!

Zachary Miller

3 d a

Here's an interesting one that people are disagreeing about: if you're in McDonald's drive thru and pay for the next persons food at the first window, then, upon presenting both receipts, proceed to take both meals at the second window, and you do this maliciously because the next person beeped at you or something, I say you have committed theft. When you tendered payment for the meal as a gift, the next person owned the meal, and you took it.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

For my part, I'd also consider it theft, unless you were a diabetic and had a very urgent blood sugar drop, and needed more than you had paid for for yourself.

But on a somewhat different ground.

What one steals in that way is not money, not even so much money's value in strictly economic terms, as the goods paid for. What one steals is time and confidence.

One robs the other of a carefree occasion to eat a nice meal. He's behind you, he has already left his place in the queue to someones behind him, and if he wants a meal the same place and him paying for it as originally planned, you have robbed him of the time he had originally, and made sure he's angrier and hungrier when he arrives in the queue, or he could have been forced to continue without the meal and buy sth more sugar and less consistent somewhere where it's faster.

If it's done once, simply because one regrets the generosity, that's probably still venial, though depends on the size of the meal. In stealing, a day's wage is the limit between venial and mortal, I've been told, and just one meal is usually not the full usage of a days' wage, but it's a pretty substantial part of it.

If people make sure to do so and similar things more often, it's systematically robbing someone of peace, it is manstealing, such people deserve the death penalty according to Exodus 21:16.

Please arrange for his compositions to be played, someone!

If you like to do the same for me, I'd appreciate./HGL