Poll: An unlocked car is stolen, who is to blame?

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

-snip-

Sorry, I'm not certain what point you're trying to make here. What logic are you referring to in the first paragraph? I'm a little slow on the uptake today.

The logic of the quote about keeping honest people honest. Honest people aren't saints, they just have composure and self-control. To just assume that they have no temptations and then proceed to further provide them with more temptations will inadvertently end up pushing some of them over their limit of composure while if you take care not to do this then the minimum amount of incidents will occur.

We have a tendency to just shame people who have a dark side and tell them off but doing so is not going to make that dark side go away.

 

[one squirrel]

1.: How far are you willing to take that line of thinking: If I leave my wallet unattended on the table at the bar, while I go to the restroom, and it gets stolen, would you still say that I am blameless? What if I leave my 5000? bike unlocked on the street for a couple of hours in the worst part of the city? What if I gave 50000? of my savings to a complete stranger and expect it to get back? At what point would you call me an unresponsible moron and that I am to blame for my loss?

2.: Is telling someone to lock their houses doors victim blaming?

1. If you consistently acted in the way you describe, I would suspect that you are either deliberately looking for misfortune or are so well-off that these losses are nothing more than a minor inconvenience to you. Either way, the situation is at best an implausible hypothetical. And it still does nothing to change the fact that the antagonist in this equation is willfully violating someone's rights. A line has been crossed, and it wasn't by the victim. Also, the word you're looking for is irresponsible.

I think if you are being so certain about something, you must be willing to defend your stance against ever less plausible examples. You have to draw the line somewhere or live with the consequences of not drawing the line at all and apply the same principle in absurd situations. And yes, thank you for correcting my error.

2. If you do it after their house gets burglarized? Yes. If you do it before? No, though if you wanted to, you could still be a dick about it I suppose.

I tend to agree there, but then it seems like a question of being or not being an asshole. Why would a statement that was correct prior to the crime suddenly beome wrong or unethical after the crime?

I have some questions for everyone who is saying that only the thief is to blame, and the person leaving the car unlocked is 100% blameless:

1.: How far are you willing to take that line of thinking: If I leave my wallet unattended on the table at the bar, while I go to the restroom, and it gets stolen, would you still say that I am blameless? What if I leave my 5000? bike unlocked on the street for a couple of hours in the worst part of the city? What if I gave 50000? of my savings to a complete stranger and expect it to get back? At what point would you call me an unresponsible moron and that I am to blame for my loss?

1: Yes, you are blameless. If that is not the case and you are to blame for your loss, should we not charge you with bike theft as you just said it's your fault the theft happened?

No, I don't think you have to come to that conclusion. We are talking about two sorts of responsibilities: The thief is responsible for the theft, the victim might be responsible for the loss. Noone is aguing that the victim is responsible for the theft.

 

[WolfThomas]

The thief is still a criminal. However the owners is not smart and probably voided their insurance contract somewhere.

It is also quite interesting to know that burglary insurances won't pay if the customer has been grossly neglient, for example if they have some sort of climbing aid next to their house.

This sort of policy does not strike me as unethical, but in the light of this discussion it seems like it should. Don't really know what to think.

But that's ultimately the matter of a civil contract being breached. No laws have been broken, unlike when the criminal breaks the law by stealing.

 

[jklinders]

If we break this question down to it's most basic principal level it might be a little easier to remove any of the ambiguity that is being debated here.

Owner of car has the ability to lock or leave unlocked their car. The action he takes either way does not actually end in the car being stolen unless an outside element, the car thief intervenes. Without the unlawful action of the car thief, the car remains unstolen in either event. If you remove the car thief from the equation, the theft does not happen regardless if the car is unlocked or locked. This leaves us with a pretty clean logical conclusion of who is to blame for the crime. After all if we are going to talk about the owner not taking measures to prevent the crime, why stop at locking doors? Maybe a club to lock the steering. Maybe remove a tire. Several layers of security systems. Armed guards. Armed guard who themselves would not steal it. Where is the line?

Take the thief out of the equation, there is no theft. Pretty simple isn't it?

 

[McElroy]

Take the thief out of the equation, there is no theft. Pretty simple isn't it?

This is just everyone wanting to establish a level of empathy towards a person who leaves their soon-to-be stolen car unlocked. The "blame" towards the owner of the car is actually "the amount of finger pointing, facepalming, ridicule, or whatever I would personally direct to the owner for being careless" which is different for each person in this thread AND also changes every time with the scenario.

For example I've said that an open door plus leaving the key inside is asking for your car to be stolen, but if it's hotwired then no. A single line is indeed tough to draw unless people think about it as "maybe the car gets stolen or maybe not". But there are flavours in this. Maybe the thief tried a row of cars and one had its door unlocked. The thief is lucky to find a car they can steal, BUT the owner of the car isn't unlucky because the thief came by - they're unlucky because they left the door unlocked.

 

[jklinders]

Take the thief out of the equation, there is no theft. Pretty simple isn't it?

This is just everyone wanting to establish a level of empathy towards a person who leaves their soon-to-be stolen car unlocked. The "blame" towards the owner of the car is actually "the amount of finger pointing, facepalming, ridicule, or whatever I would personally direct to the owner for being careless" which is different for each person in this thread AND also changes every time with the scenario.

For example I've said that an open door plus leaving the key inside is asking for your car to be stolen, but if it's hotwired then no. A single line is indeed tough to draw unless people think about it as "maybe the car gets stolen or maybe not". But there are flavours in this. Maybe the thief tried a row of cars and one had its door unlocked. The thief is lucky to find a car they can steal, BUT the owner of the car isn't unlucky because the thief came by - they're unlucky because they left the door unlocked.

But is that not the very problem posed here. Just where do we draw the line. The question (I'm being pedantic here but fuck it) was asking who was to blame for the theft, not could the owner have made it more difficult. Blame implies that the owner was specifically asking for the calamity of the theft to be visited on him. If I'm a pretty girl walking home at night, am I asking to be raped? If i'm the owner of a car and leave it unlocked am i asking it be broken into? Seriously, there is a lot of overlap in these scenarios. What about if I live in a shitty neighborhood and lock up? Is it still my fault because I did not take effort to live in a better area? Also not covered in the question, but if a car thief can hotwire a car, i guarantee that they can bypass the lock in seconds. If the lock is disabled where do we draw that line?

I say again, if we remove the thief from the equation, is there still a theft? The owners actions are not coming into this end result as much as you might think. And I'm not talking insurance law here. The question was clearly a moral one. Moral questions rarely have a whole lot of real world bearing. In the real world people smash car windows if so much as a quarter is visible though the car window. Or a couple of bridge tokens even. My father used to take the incident reports for the local police. Thinking that a car lock is an impediment in a real world setting is more laughable to me than you might think.

Small edit to correct sentence meaning.

 

[Strazdas]

It is scary how many people hereblame the car owner for doing nothing wrong. He commited no crime and made noones life harder. what the hell are you blaming him for somone else stealing shit?

Remmeber when people used to leave their houses unlocked? Were they also committing crimes?

 

[Tsun Tzu]

The owner is at fault for not locking their car...and only for not locking their car.

The person who stole it is entirely at fault for the action of stealing said car.

 

[one squirrel]

It is scary how many people hereblame the car owner for doing nothing wrong. He commited no crime and made noones life harder. what the hell are you blaming him for somone else stealing shit?

Remmeber when people used to leave their houses unlocked? Were they also committing crimes?

Well, I've seen noone arguing that not locking ones car is committing a crime. Also, what and what not is to be considered sensible/responsible is dependent on circumstances and environment. If I live on a hill I don't need flood insurance, and similarly if I don't live in an area where there are almost no burglaries I can have my house unlocked without being overly irresponsible.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

It is scary how many people hereblame the car owner for doing nothing wrong. He commited no crime and made noones life harder. what the hell are you blaming him for somone else stealing shit?

Remmeber when people used to leave their houses unlocked? Were they also committing crimes?

Well, I've seen noone arguing that not locking ones car is committing a crime. Also, what and what not is to be considered sensible/responsible is dependent on circumstances and environment. If I live on a hill I don't need flood insurance, and similarly if I don't live in an area where there are almost no burglaries I can have my house unlocked without being overly irresponsible.

Insurance is an interesting example since it is illegal to drive a car if it's uninsured. Even if you never crash it if you are found driving it you will have problems.


Isn't that the case because car accidents are a common enough occurrence that having no insurance amounts to some degree of illegal-levels negligence?


That being so, clearly there is a line where "doing nothing wrong" can still end up being illegal, so the question is where to draw the line. People who claim there's never such an instance are going at it from a fictional angle where if you do nothing wrong you "deserve" only good things to happen to you, as though the world is some kind of videogame.

 

[one squirrel]

It is scary how many people hereblame the car owner for doing nothing wrong. He commited no crime and made noones life harder. what the hell are you blaming him for somone else stealing shit?

Remmeber when people used to leave their houses unlocked? Were they also committing crimes?

Well, I've seen noone arguing that not locking ones car is committing a crime. Also, what and what not is to be considered sensible/responsible is dependent on circumstances and environment. If I live on a hill I don't need flood insurance, and similarly if I don't live in an area where there are almost no burglaries I can have my house unlocked without being overly irresponsible.

Insurance is an interesting example since it is illegal to drive a car if it's uninsured. Even if you never crash it if you are found driving it you will have problems.


Isn't that the case because car accidents are a common enough occurrence that having no insurance amounts to some degree of illegal-levels negligence?


That being so, clearly there is a line where "doing nothing wrong" can still end up being illegal, so the question is where to draw the line. People who claim there's never such an instance are going at it from a fictional angle where if you do nothing wrong you "deserve" only good things to happen to you, as though the world is some kind of videogame.

Yes. Behaving responsibly also means acknowledging that not everyone is playing by the rules. Failing to take that into account is a reason to shift part of the blame onto the supposed victim.

One other interesting example (at least in my country) for this is that if someone is crossing the street using a crosswalk but being extremely careless and as a result they get hit by a car, they might not be entitled to compensation.

 

[Damir Halilovic]

Blaming the thief 100% completely negates any personal responsibility of the owner, which is a very dangerous line to toe.

Rephrase the situation like this: There was no thief, but an escaped zoo monkey got into the car, managed to start the ignition and drove into a river, drowning in the process. Or if that's too unlikely, let's just say he took a dump and smeared it on the wind shield. If you want to make it more gruesome though - let's say the owner left his dog in the car, said monkey opened the door and the dog ran under the bus.

In all of those you now have a 100% "the owner is at fault" scenario. The only difference is that in your hypothetical scenario the other party is presented as more negative than the first, which somehow absolves the first party of any guilt, which is simply not true.

The only truth of the matter is that crime will exist. It existed since the inception of humanity and might as well be the only constant until the heat-death of the universe. So yes, personal responsibility is a huge factor if you want to assign blame in these scenarios.

 

[McElroy]

snip

If it's a question about morals, there is little ambiguity - the thief is the wrong-doer. Would be a shorter thread but it got into places, didn't it? I think the poll in the op already invites this, asking "how much". People are talking about two different things here and similarly we can draw parallels with a million other scenarios.

You say that in a real life situation it's closer to "the car gets stolen or it won't". Okay then, but the moral question is exactly the same with an unlocked bicycle, and there the lock is a major deterrence against possible theft. Taking a risk vs "deserves any outcome", and those overlap after crossing a line that people by and large cannot specify. Unless... well, now I'm starting to repeat myself.

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

While you could argue that the thief should not make it their business to appropriate the property of others, certainly from an insurance point of view a company would not pay out on the grounds that the owner had not made sufficient provision for the security of their property. Basically, the rights you have to a piece of property do not replace or supersede the responsibility you have to maintain your property in a safe and secure manner.

And yes, I know that's a very boring answer.

 

[jklinders]

snip

If it's a question about morals, there is little ambiguity - the thief is the wrong-doer. Would be a shorter thread but it got into places, didn't it? I think the poll in the op already invites this, asking "how much". People are talking about two different things here and similarly we can draw parallels with a million other scenarios.

You say that in a real life situation it's closer to "the car gets stolen or it won't". Okay then, but the moral question is exactly the same with an unlocked bicycle, and there the lock is a major deterrence against possible theft. Taking a risk vs "deserves any outcome", and those overlap after crossing a line that people by and large cannot specify. Unless... well, now I'm starting to repeat myself.

Ironically locking a bicycle is a lot more effective than locking a car. I was not making that stuff up about the theft and break in reports my father took. If a quarter is enough incentive to get someone to smash a window then a locked car door is remarkably ineffective. Full blame still on the thief. you are ASSUMING for the purpose of this thought exercise that the thief will not steal the car if the door is locked. That was not a stated condition. And that is exactly where placing any blame on the owner in this thought exercise falls to pieces.

Nice chat. I look forward to your response.

 

[maninahat]

I have some questions for everyone who is saying that only the thief is to blame, and the person leaving the car unlocked is 100% blameless:

1.: How far are you willing to take that line of thinking: If I leave my wallet unattended on the table at the bar, while I go to the restroom, and it gets stolen, would you still say that I am blameless? What if I leave my 5000? bike unlocked on the street for a couple of hours in the worst part of the city? What if I gave 50000? of my savings to a complete stranger and expect it to get back? At what point would you call me an unresponsible moron and that I am to blame for my loss?

Those are all the same as the car with the exception of the last one, which is ambiguous. In all cases, its a person taking what isn't theres who is to blame. We can acknowledge the naivety or poor decision making of the victim, but its explicitly only because of the thief's existence and wrong doing that we can even qualify it as naivety or poor decision making. The last example is ambiguous in that by giving your money to a stranger, you may at least be implicitly telling them that the money is now theirs. If you had made it clear that wasn't the case on handing it over, then it is the exact same as the above examples (a thief and a blameless naif).

2.: Is telling someone to lock their houses doors victim blaming?

Depends how you phrase it. "You were asking to be burgled because you left your house unlocked" would be victim blaming. "I recommend you lock your house as a precaution against burglars" isn't.

 

[Sonmi]

Criminal responsibility and personal responsibility are not the same, you're making a false equivalence.

How so? Is criminal responsibility not based in personal responsibility? If not, then what is it based on?

Criminal responsibility is based in personal responsibility, but not every case of personal irresponsibility is criminally reprehensible.

You're being daft on purpose.

 

[Smithnikov_v1legacy]

Criminal responsibility is based in personal responsibility, but not every case of personal irresponsibility is criminally reprehensible.

What's the magic separating line then?

 

[Smithnikov_v1legacy]

Blaming the thief 100% completely negates any personal responsibility of the owner, which is a very dangerous line to toe.

Alright, then what should the owner be charged with if the thief is not 100% responsible?

 

[Smithnikov_v1legacy]

Well, I've seen noone arguing that not locking ones car is committing a crime.

Yes you are. There are people saying that the thief is not 100% responsible for the crime. Therefore, someone else is committing a crime also.