[Skybird]

I think this sums it up best:

Originally Posted by Aramike

It seems simple to me, anyway - if you've exhausted all possibilities with which to obtain the basic necessities for survival, than stealing is morally justified. If you haven't, or intend to steal simply to increase a standard of luxary, than it is not.

I see that many postings have started to base on assumptions about the original case which ignore some of the basic content of this original case, what Father Jones said. So let me stress them again.

"I do not offer such advice because I think that stealing is a good thing, or because I think it is harmless, for it is neither.

"I would ask that they do not steal from small, family businesses, but from national businesses, knowing that the costs are ultimately passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher prices.

"When people are released from prison, or find themselves suddenly without work or family support, then to leave them for weeks and weeks with inadequate or clumsy social support is monumental, catastrophic folly.
"We create a situation which leaves some people little option but crime."

Speaking later on BBC Radio York, Father Jones said his intention had not been to rally people to shoplifting, but to encourage people to give more to charity to avoid those in need from becoming so desperate.

"If one has exhausted every legal opportunity to get money and you're still in a desperate situation it is a better moral thing to do to take absolutely no more than you need for no longer than you need," he said.

The grim truth is that our wellfare systems, whether it be the voluntary, not mandatory system in the US, or the more oligational, mandatory system in europe/Germany, simply do not reach or pick up everybody who would be in need of the options they offer. There are a lot of things one can imagine to stand in the way, from the simply lack of such options in a given place, to human, subjective factors you have to take into account that hinders the individual person in need to go for a wellfare or charity option that in principle is available. Do not make the mistake to just point to an ideal situation laid out on paper and described in a plan or law. People are no abstract entities that obey the rules of reason and statistics. People are subjective, emotional, often irrational, and their wits and knowledge differ. the minimum of pride some still try to maintain, can bring them into situations worse than before, due to paradoxical effects. If you think that just because your wellfare system in theory offers any needed option (it doesn't, btw, not in the US and not in Germany), everybody in need actually being able to make use of that and being in reach of these means, then you already have done a very cruel mistake. You consider the dewscpriton of ann itnention how reality should be, to be more real than the reality many people have to deal with.