Investigators recovered two stolen trailers carrying $1.3 million in data center supplies, including copper wire and infrastructure equipment.
Investigators recovered two stolen trailers carrying $1.3 million in data center supplies, including copper wire and infrastructure equipment.
No, it is breaking a law, which is not necessarily wrongdoing. As I said, there are many unjust laws. Laws are not the arbiter of morality.
Since you said it can be justified morally under certain circumstances, but still consider it wrongdoing, this might just be a case of semantics. Something that is morally justified cannot also be considering wrongdoing to me.
So yes, it is theft. That alone doesn’t tell me whether or not it’s wrong. In this specific case, the data center thefts, I agree it is wrong of them to take items that are not theirs for the purpose of profiting from them. However, they are committing theft against something that itself constantly commits far greater theft by its very nature, not to mention great harm to the economy and environment. So it’s bad things happening to bad people, which I am not going to object to like I would if it happened to someone innocent. There are degrees of wrongness.
I think we’re using the word “wrongdoing” differently.
Theft is the intentional taking of someone else’s property without permission. That is, by definition, a violation of their property rights. In that sense, it is a wrongdoing. Whether that wrongdoing is justified is a separate moral question.
A starving person stealing bread is still committing theft. I may conclude that it is morally justified because preserving a human life outweighs the owner’s property rights. That doesn’t magically transform the act into “not wrongdoing.” It means one wrongdoing is excused by a greater moral obligation.
If we say a morally justified theft is no longer wrongdoing, then we’ve collapsed the distinction between describing an act and evaluating it. Every action we personally approve of would cease to be wrongdoing by definition, which makes the term lose much of its usefulness.
So I agree that context matters. I agree that there are degrees of moral culpability. But justification doesn’t change what the act is. It changes how we judge the person who committed it.