Such an individual definition of morality makes any meaningful discussion nigh impossible. I’m not a student of ethics, but I suspect there is a distinction between individual and group/universal morality.
It is a very different question to ask, “Do you think this is wrong,” that to ask, “Do you wish everyone acted this way?”
I think you are pushing the goalposts in one direction by focussing on the words “theft” and “megacorporation.”
Another thought - was the customer being strategic in using the self checkout rather than a cashier? I don’t know that this is determinative, or even if that store had cashiers. And maybe he wanted to save time or just preferred self-serve. But it makes me question whether he thought his “case” would be established more effectively by generating the receipt, rather than having it noticed and addressed by a human at the point of purchase.
No question in my mind the guy knew he was “pulling a fast one,” and he went to some lengths to do so (taking the photo, using self-cashier.) As opposed to simply asking the butcher or any other employee, “Is this correct?” In the grand scheme of things, not the biggest of deals. But not behavior I personally would respect.
Here is a possibly goofy analogy. In my work for a government agency, sometimes the agency errs and pays someone benefits they are not entitled to. Termed an overpayment. And sometimes it takes the Agency a while to discover the error and request repayment. Recovery of the overpayment. It has long ceased to surprise me how many relatively sophisticated people, who are well able to repay the amount, and who should have known that the payments they received were in error - simply feel they should get to keep the money because the government paid it to them and took some amount of time in discovering the error.
Megacorps don’t get any bigger than the US government. So I guess that’s fine…
I’m only “coming back” to the same extent that you are, inasumch as we don’t have the same view on whether the store “agreed” to the sale. I think you’re equivocating on two senses of agreement. Yes, legally they ultimately agreed to the sale, they are not calling the cops and accusing him of shoplifting. But what really happened is that they were coerced into the sale by the customer exploiting a legal loophole. This is not “agreement” in the sense of willingly complying with mutually correctly understood terms.
No, what you did is perfectly reasonable. The prices aren’t obvious errors, you are buying stuff you actually want, and you aren’t trying to game the system by “earning” the penalty.
You have not set forth your definitions of “megacorporation” or otherwise set forth guidelines as to when the power/knowledge/wealth is sufficiently unequal as to make it moral for the weaker/smaller/poorer party to take advantage of obvious mistakes made by the larger/wealthier.
No dissertation needed, but I haven’t seen that in any of your posts.
This is also a very important point to the ethics, assuming such is not a bullshit claim.
Fairly sure that at least some of those veterans do not share the knee jerk stick it to Big Food attitude and would object to eating food that they feel was ill begotten. Putting them in a position in which they are passively complicit is also ethically incorrect. The person is not Robin Hood here.
I think the distinction is you (general “you”) innocently buy a mismarked item and aren’t really aware of the “actual” price and buy one item versus recognizing the mismarked price and then buying ALL their stock at that mismarked price.
At the risk of a hijack, a portion (not all) of the veterans I encounter in my work come across as the most self-entitled, greediest of the folk I encounter. So let’s be careful about attributing certain “morality” to all vets as a group.
Yes. Buying what you want at the indicated price is fine. It’s not your responsibility to uncover their errors.
But knowing they are making a mistake, taking steps to avoid the corporation noticing (using the self checkout) buying every single mispriced item, and insisting on the penalty price are the actions of an asshole.
That hasn’t actually been established. I have noted, repeatedly, that Michigan has a Consumer Protection Act, and it certainly would be relevant here. But the question of whether or not a consumer who recognizes an obvious mistake can nevertheless rely on on the Act is probably a bit more nuanced.
Even so–even if the MCPA is absolutely and unambiguously on the side of the customer–there’s still several degrees of separation from actual coercion. (1) The consumer did offer to return the goods when the manager suggested there might be consequences for employees, but the manager declined to accept that offer; (2) the consumer here is not a state actor, so they can hardly be said to be leveraging the coercive power of the state directly, particularly when–again–he offered to back out of the purchase and the manager declined (suggesting it’s unlikely he’d have filed a complaint with the state); ETA (3) we have no idea what the megacorporation’s own policy might be: perhaps it’s the megacorporation’s policy, its own free choice, that compelled the manager to allow the refund/discount.
And that’s all relevant only if you subscribe to @Riemann’s objection and think agreement is important. However, if, like me, you don’t think it’s particularly important that the megacorpoation or its agents have an opportunity to make a free choice, independent of state coercion, before being held strictly liable for their own mistake, then it doesn’t really matter what the details of the law may be.
Of course I agree that the manager would have been an asshole to fire the employee under these circumstances.
However, the consequences for employees are certainly part of the calculus of the morality of this customer’s actions. If a lot of customers behaved this way, and the law forced the store to take a substantial loss even for manifest errors in pricing, then the store would be forced to reduce the rate of errors to near zero. How would it do this? It would have to employ only people who are sufficiently good at mental arithmetic and obsessively careful about never making errors in pricing displays. Or incentivize this with preferential raises or promotions for people with these qualities. Ultimately, it would have to mean firing people. How would you feel about this if you are a potential employee who has other great qualities but your strong points aren’t math or being anally retentive about being 100% error-free?
It’s been a while since I read “How to Win Friends and Influence People” but I seem to recall an admonition in there to not fire an employee who made one mistake because they tend to get really good at not making the same mistake again.
So let’s grant the hypothetical that the manager had no legal obligation here. There are certainly other situations where that’s true.
Many stores in the U.S. have found that it’s good marketing to offer extremely generous return policies. REI is (or was) a notable example, and it’s particularly attractive for outdoor gear because often you won’t discover that (say) a ski boot doesn’t fit well or a tent has impractical features until you have used it a fair amount in different conditions.
However, a minority of customers would egregiously abuse these return policies. People would, for example, buy fancy new ski equipment and outfits from REI in December and return them well used at the end of the ski season, with no obligation under the policy to say anything other that it “wasn’t working out” for them.
There is no question of legality here, and the REI voluntarily provided this generous return policy. But it was inevitable that a minority of people abusing the intent of the policy would have an impact on all customers. Either prices must go up for everyone, or the return policy must be made more stringent (the latter certainly happened eventually).
Yet by your code, I see no difference from the customer with the prime rib. It would appear that you would say that the people exploiting the generous REI store policy were acting ethically.
I see that as a business decision made by a store to allow generous returns. If the store is too stupid to develop a better tailored policy that would prevent such returns as you describe, that is on the store. But that people are taking advantage of the store’s decision? Yeah, no. I don’t see a problem with that. Whatever effects that might have on the price for others… again, that’s the store’s policy, which the store’s owners/agents are responsible for. Color me not concerned.
Meanwhile, megacorporations are using their wealth, as facilitated by recent SCOTUS decisions conferring unprecedented (relative to their status as artificial creations) First Amendment rights that used to be only for living, breathing people, to push us ever closer to oligarchy. And yet for some reason you’re wringing your hands over a slim minority of customers getting the occasional really good deal?
In short, I think my moral compass is just fine, and I have no reason to doubt the moral decision-making ability of the subject of the OP, either.
You do seem to be explicitly advocating a social contract where we agree that we should all feel free to lie and cheat as much as we can legally get away with.
This is a straw man. Nobody here is defending megacorporations.
The issue here is that I think that the abusive practices of megacorporations should be addressed through consistent regulation and fair taxation, not by a minority of unethical people stealing from them.
Makes me wonder about how different it is for one to judge their own moral compass, as opposed to other people assessing that person’s moral compass.
I’m sure the prisons are full of folk who think their moral compasses are just fine. Same with many an adulterer, embezzler, litterer… But various segments of society may disagree with such an individual’s personal assessment.
No. I am advocating for a moral framework whereby we recognize the power differential, in our inherently uneven socioeconomic system, between the massively wealthy and the common individual and so hold the massively wealthy strictly liable for their mistakes when doing so would result in a de minimis benefit to the individual. Call it a kind of distributive justice.
If the response, from the massively wealthy, is to fire another one of the common folk for making a simple mistake or raises prices to recoup lost profits… that’s their decision. They are the source of the immorality in that case. Not some random dude who lucked out on a good deal on prime rib once in his lifetime.
And of course this is not how I would prefer to see society ordered. I’d much rather we just didn’t have massively wealthy individuals or corporations. But in the meantime… I’ll take what I can get.
Are you kidding? That’s what this whole thread has been about from my POV. Do you not see how much of my moral calculus hinges on the difference between a massively wealthy corporation on the one hand and an individual on the other? Didn’t we begin with a mom/pop vs. megacorporation distinction for a reason?
