How should I respond to this?
I’ve been debating a socialist on property rights, and they had this to say:
“If you have an ultimate right to property, that means that stealing is worse than a human being dying. In fact, by your logic it would seem, ANY amount of humans dying. If I have a button that, if pressed, prevents a natural disaster that would kill every single human on earth, is someone justified in stealing my button? I put my labor into making the button, so by your logic stealing it would be immoral. If human lives are always less important than property rights, then the world is going to end because I don’t feel like pressing a button. I don’t want to hear “no one has a right to my property because they want it” for the millionth time, just asserting it doesn’t make it true, explain why your property rights are more important than someone’s life.”
I have typed up the following response, but am a bit unsatisfied with it. Is there anything else you guys would add or say?
“You’re asking “should you steal a person’s property if it will result in saving lives?” This question is very similar to Dan Barker’s “should you rape someone if it would save the human race?” Not because being stolen from is just as traumatic as being raped (though trauma is very subjective and relative), but because both questions are essentially “should you do *insert immoral thing* if it will lead to *insert good thing*?” I would say no and that to suggest otherwise would committing a “ends justifies the means” fallacy. I’m not even necessarily opposed to the idea of someone stealing the button to save the human race. I just don’t think it should be free of consequences. Stealing doesn’t retroactively become justified just because it happens to lead to something beneficial. I am preempting you will say that stealing is alright in this case because the harm experienced by everyone on the planet is worth more than the inconvenience felt by the person being stolen from. Firstly, there is no universal calculus that can calculate and measure harm compared to other harms, especially since harm is very subjective and differs from person to person (what one considers an inconvenience, another person considers traumatic). To complicate your hypothetical, what if the person has a seizure if the button is pressed? How does their harm measure up against the lives of everyone else?”
submitted by /u/anfal857
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