from every bank account in the U.S., what kind of crime have I committed?
Image I’m a hacker-mage-uberlord who writes a worm that travels the financial systems of the world, untraceably transferring just one dollar from every bank account it reaches to a thoroughly laundered account that is further untraceable to me. So, I can’t be caught; this is a moral question, not a legal one.
On the one hand, the damage to everyone is miniscule, and would probably go unnoticed by better than 99% of the victims. For certain, any corporate account missing only one dollar, even if detected, wouldn’t be investigated (balancing errors in corporate books would almost certainly cover it up); if it was brought to the bank’s attention, the bank would probably just replace the dollar, yell at its IS department for a while, and forget about it. A bank that noticed the pattern of a dollar missing from each account would assume that, if it’s not a computer error, it’s a computer crime; but after initial investigations turned up little, it would just become a big question mark in their corporate history.
On the other hand, I’m richer by (at the very least) millions of dollars.
This is the most victimless crime I can imagine. The scale of my illicit gains makes it seem truly evil: I’ve stolen millions, maybe hundreds of millions, from the bank-account-using population. But everyone has lost just one dollar.
This may be a UL, but i recall a story about a guy who worked at a large bank. He worked at night posting accounts. He hit upon the idea of transferring a penny from every account into a dummy account. After several months, he’d accumulated quite a sum. HOWEVER! He just happened to be taking money from an account that someone else was trying to access, and it set off an alarm. He was caught and charged with grand larceny.
Well, perhaps I was unclear in the OP. You’re right, stealing is immoral, whether it’s one dollar or ten million. I’m asking after the scale of the evil. Is it a little evil (because the victimisation is so small as to largely unnoticed), or really evil (because of the scale of my illicit earnings)?
Nope, in that film, and in the more recent ( and hilarious ) Office Space, they were stealing fractions of pennies not whole pennies. The program just rounded down the fraction and moved it into their account.
Mr. Pryor would never be so crass. What he transferred to his account in Superman III was the *fractions * of pennies that were generated when interest was applied to accounts.
Now there is an interesting moral question. In the movie, those fractions would have otherwise been rounded down and disappeared. No one would have gotten them. So, was what Mr. Pryor’s character doing stealing? Can you steal something that, but for the fact that you “stole” it, wouldn’t exist? If it’s not stealing, is does this fall under a different legal/ethical infraction.
I believe the answer under the Talmud is that it is improper to earn your living without “earning” it. 'Course, I could be wrong.
Actually the fractions of pennies in your example do not disapear. They are not paid to the accounts so the bank just keeps them. If they went into the accounts they would also accrue interest and would become worth more than a penny. So in effect, the bank was taking them from the owners of the accounts. As Mr. Pryor’s nice new sportscar illustrates, this is not an unlucrative proposition for the bank. Although since this is a business practice by the bank that I assume that an account holder would be tacitly agreeing to by opening an account, it probably should not be called stealing. However, if the bank did not make this policy clear, I would catagorize it as dishonest.
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hansel:
I would base my moral decision on the ammount that the thief stole from a person. A dollar per account does not seem to me to be as serious a crime as stealing all of a person’s savings.
I am appalled at the idea that it is somehow less offensive to steal a small amount of money from amny people than to steal a large amount of money from one person. Some of you seem to be arguing that a mitigating factor can be found in the scale of the theft. If you wish to consider scale, though, you must also consider the scale of the benefit.
I steal one dollar from you. I gain one dollar. The cost to you is small. The gain to me is equally small. I have in effect determined that I have more right to your money, in whatever arbitrary sum I determine, than you. I gain no great benefit from this, since my take in each instance is no greater than your loss. I cannot argue great need in defense of my action, since my gain is only a dollar. The equation is uite simple: you have something; I want it; I take it.
I fail to see any “morality of scale” here. I have simply sold my integrity for a million small evils rather than one great evil. I do not see petty theft on a grand scale as somehow more moral than grand theft on an individual scale.
Am I reading your post correctly in saying that you would favor punishing a person who stole $1 in exactly the same way that you would punish a person who stole $100 million?
No. I favor punishing a person who steals $1 a million times exactly the same as a person who steals $100 million dollars one time. As a personal ethic, I consider the theft of $1 without need to be equivalent to the theft of $100 million without need, but a sentencing authority should consider harm done as well as crime committed.
But this is just the point of my example. In practical terms, the harm done is so negligible as to go unnoticed by almost every victim (which forces the question of whether or not any harm at all is done, in that case).
Let’s put it in concrete terms: stealing $100 million from the company’s pension fund, versus stealing $100 million one dollar at a time. Can you really say that a dollar’s worth of damage is done when the victim never notices or noticeably suffers from it?
You know, Richard Pryor would never have gotten away with it before 1857. And not just because they didn’t have computers in 1957. He wouldn’t have gotten away with it because, before 1858, the U.S. minted a half-cent coin.
This is an absolutely asinine question. Let me ask one of my own:
Suppose I steal a million dollars from Microsoft. Well, Microsoft isn’t really a person, so I’m not stealing from anybody. Is that moral? OK, so Microsoft is really a collection of shareholders. There are plenty of shareholders, so I’m really just stealing a couple pennies from most of the shareholders. Is this moral?
Of course it’s immoral! Theft is wrong. Large theft is more so.
No one’s arguing that it’s moral. It’s a question of how immoral. Is it as bad as stealing 100 mil from the company pension fund? Are you prepared to say that the immorality of it is entirely a matter of principle, and not of practical effect?
One dollar from my account would do me great mental damage! “ergggggggggggggg!!!” <-my reaction when my acct. doesnt balance-that dollar off would drive me insane!LOL