Friday, November 9, 2007

Who would no otherwise?

At what would you stop to save your life? At what would you stop to preserve the lives of you family and children?

When thinking about crime commited by poor people my initial thought is to hold them responsible for their actions. Just like any other citizen, they had the choice of whether to commit the crime. Since they commited the crime, they should have to pay the consequences.

However, I wonder why they would commit the crime in the first place?

If I had no money and no food, yet my children were hungry or starving, I would find some way to get money. I hope I would seek employment to make money in fair and honest way. However, if for some reason I am not able to get a job or get enough money from a job, the fact still remains that my children are hungry at home.

I would probably decide to do whatever it takes to get money for food to feed my children.

Would you?

So, is crime among the poor, specifically poor families, not to be expected?

5 comments:

Mike said...

I find your argument more as pandering then an actual demonstration justifying crime in our present society. Though justification of crime is not your central argument, to show the necessity of "crime" in an unjust society through an emotional plea is illogical.

I believe that you need to define crime. Is it what is morally or ethically wrong as defined by the individual, or is it what is morally or ethically wrong as defined by the society? What if society, the majority, is wrong?

In Ibsen's play "An Enemy of the People" Dr. Stockmann states "The majority is _always_ wrong". In which case how do you define a crime?

Tarheel199 said...

I agree with what Mike said in that you need to define exactly what crime is. I assumed based on your context that you're saying it is the laws imposed by society as to what is right and wrong, but I'm not sure.

Although the emotional plea is probably a little biased, I think it can still be effective on most people. I'm on the side that if with no other options and the only way to save your family is to commit a crime, then I think I would do it and a lot of people would as well.

lifesizesuperman said...

This post was not meant as an argument. It was meant simply as a post saying: I am still trying to understand the whole debate and topic. I'm not trying to persuade either way.

Me said...

It seems to me that this post was more about trying to get your readers and yourself to think more in depth about the topic, not so much arguing one thing or another. Although you are not just piclking a side to argue i still think that it would be helpful to define what is meant by crime, and fully describe all of the aspect of this definiton, both morally and ethically.

I took your advice and did reword my posits once again, i now see that it is better to ask waht i dont know about the topic than it is to ask what i already know. Going along with this i like how you included the questions in the last posting, it really showed that you were thinking about the topic.

Me said...
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