Mahatma Gandhi Essay Example for Free

Mahatma Gandhi Essay An acquaintance of mine is a highly paid professional lacking none of life’s luxuries. He plays the violin as a hobby and frequently plays in a public space, placing a jar in front of him so that passers-by can contribute money to show their appreciation. Other musicians play in that space, but they move on if another musician is already there. His actions suggest, to me, that he’s a struggling musician in need of financial assistance, but he’s collecting dollar bills from people who may be less fortunate financially than he. Your thoughts on the ethics of this? NAME WITHHELD, NEW YORK The reason this strikes you as problematic has to do with your view of what this man is doing. You see his actions as a request for undeserved charity. He sees his actions as a performance that has potential value. And he is correct. Part of your argument is based on the premise that your acquaintance is occupying a common space that could better serve a less fortunate peer. That contention would make sense if the guy were panhandling. But that is not what he’s doing. He’s creating art for public consumption; he is, by the strictest definition of the term, a professional musician. While not charging for this work, he’s still saying, â€Å"I believe my music has value — and if you agree, pay me whatever amount you think is justified.† He’s not expecting people to give him money just because he’s standing there. That people less wealthy than he is might be generating his revenue is irrelevant. If you go to a Metallica concert, you would have a hard time finding one person in the entire arena who’s richer than the band’s drummer. Does this mean Metallica should provide free tickets to every member of their audience who makes less money than they do? I suppose you could make the case that they should. But it wouldn’t be a very good one. THE GRAPE THIEF A man goes to the supermarket and passes a table of fruit. His eye meets a luscious bunch of seedless grapes. The man puts the grapes in a plastic bag and proceeds to eat one, before having them weighed to determine the price. Is this an unethical act? Is it stealing? Why is stealing even unethical? MAYA AZOURI, TORONTO The first two parts of your question are not particularly meaningful. Is this stealing? Yes (the man took something he didn’t pay for). Is it unethical? Yes (although the value of one grape is so minor that it impedes on the livelihood of no one). The third aspect of your query, however — why is stealing unethical — is intriguing. The answer seems so obvious that it’s almost never questioned, even though it might not be obvious at all. I approached this question by working though all the existing reasons people don’t steal on a regular basis. The first is that it’s illegal; we don’t steal things because we’ve communally agreed that there is a justified, enforceable penalty for doing so. Another reason has to do with the influence of religion; pretty much whatever religious text you accept tautologically states that stealing is wrong because â€Å"stealing is wrong.† A third reason is tied to the design of our economic framework: If people can just pilfer whatever they desire, nothing will have monetary value (in the example you cite, the man who harvests the grapes can’t earn a living if those grapes can be freely taken by whoever wants them). But let’s keep going. Let’s move into a â€Å"Mad Max† scenario: If we lived in a lawless, secular, money-free society, would stealing still be wrong? It would. And this is because the alternative would make us nervous and unhappy. Part of this problem has to do with the philosophical concept of ownership. Can objects truly be â€Å"owned† by someone, or is this just a word we use to describe an unreal proviso? The more you think about that question, the more complicated it becomes. But it ultimately doesn’t matter, because we’ve collectively decided to live as though ownership isreal. We believe our possessions are extensions of ourselves. So if stealing were an acceptable practice — if we lived in a world in which people just took whatever they wanted, simply because there was no clear argument for doing otherwise — our lives would be consumed by anxiety. We would live in constant fear and spend all our energy protecting our possessions. Traveling would become impossible, because we couldn’t go anywhere without bringing along everything we owned. People would be less motivated to create things, because they would have no way of stopping others from taking away those creations. Violence would increase exponentially. Though I’m not sure if we’re ethically obligated to make the lives of others better, we are ethically obligated not to make the lives of others worse. And that’s what stealing does: it makes it impossible for other people to pursue their own happiness. It destabilizes society. In your supermarket example, the level of instability is so negligible that there’s no impact; it’s almost as if that level of theft is built into our lives as a release valve from morality. But if you extrapolate the grape thief’s actions outward and upward, it doesn’t take long before