If I shouldn’t blindly follow society, and I shouldn’t blindly follow instinct… what the fuck should I follow?

Let’s talk about stealing, for example. We can all agree that stealing is wrong.

But now let me give you some examples, and let’s see if we can all still agree that stealing is wrong in every case. Let’s try not to overthink any of these and take them just as they are.

• Someone steals an old lady’s handbag for fun. | That’s an easy one. Wrong.
• Someone steals bread because their kid hasn’t eaten for two days. | I think that instinctively 90% of you will say, “Not wrong.” I like to disagree. I hope that none of you have ever been in a situation where there was no food on the table. And I hope that you were never a parent who didn’t know how to feed their children. I guess it’s a natural instinct for a parent to do anything they can to feed their kids, even if that means breaking the law.

But here’s what I always ask myself when I’m presented with this question: Was there really no other option?

To have so little, or no money at all, that you can’t put food on the table is exceptionally rare, even in underdeveloped countries nowadays. There is almost always a way. We are not talking about countries that are experiencing war, where there are no jobs, no wealth to move things around, etc. Those are truly exceptional cases, and the laws are all upside down by then. If there is a war, there is no more moral compass, personal or societal. Let’s talk about a “normal country.”

There is always a job available, a task to do that you are going to get paid for, even if it’s just with food and not money. There are other people you can ask for help. You can beg, even.

Was it a streak of bad decisions that got you to that point? Then stealing is even more wrong. You had options and you ruined them to the point that now you are left to steal to feed your children.

Or was it pride? You couldn’t do the menial job, you couldn’t ask for help or beg. Stealing was the only thing to do because you can still put yourself on a pedestal as the one who’d do anything for their children.

Either way, it was the parent’s decisions, or lack of them, that could have changed the course of the story one way or another.

Someone steals $100 million through financial fraud but never physically takes anything from another person. | Even though, personally, I would love to pull this off and get away with it because, let’s be honest, $100m would solve all my problems and I could enjoy life a little more, I have to say that’s still wrong. Other people’s jobs are on the line if something like this happens. It could ruin someone’s life.

Now, would stealing $100k from a company like Nvidia be wrong? What if we had a modern-era Robin Hood, an incredibly skilled hacker who could do it and use the money to give to the poor?

Just to explain, that would be 0.00000186% of it. To put it into perspective, if you had $1,000 and someone took the same percentage away from you, that would be $0.00001862, a fraction of a cent. You wouldn’t even notice. Our banks probably do that all the time, legally. Every time you go grocery shopping and something costs $0.99 and you pay cash, you are losing that.

Yet I’m sure that even now we are all agreeing that it is still wrong.

Weird, no?

Someone steals medicine they can’t afford. | That’s where it starts to get interesting. We said that stealing is wrong. At the same time, we are creatures of survival and we will do anything to make sure we survive.

Medicines are expensive. In some countries they are like a luxury. Take the case of the US, where insulin without insurance can go up to $300 per vial and an EpiPen up to $850.

Crazy, no?

Some of you could ask then, how is it different from the dad stealing bread for his son?

It’s very different. First, bread is quite cheap, a couple of bucks. You can make that money quite easily. You can beg and ask for food without having to steal anything. You can’t really beg for insulin, and to make $300 could take a couple of days or a week of work.

Now, is it still legally wrong? Yes!

Is it morally wrong, though?

Someone illegally downloads a movie. | There are only two kinds of people: those who have done it and liars.

If you lived through the early 2000s and had a PC, you probably know of eMule or uTorrent, and you have downloaded a lot of porn and badly voiced-over movies by mistake. You have also downloaded many movies that say it is illegal to download movies. The irony.

It’s wrong. It’s stealing. Yet we have all done it.

Does that make it okay, then?

Someone finds $50 on the floor and pockets it. | This is a very interesting one. If it was me who dropped that money, I would go back.

Who decides which is the true north for our moral compass?

Good question.

If, as a society, we have agreed that stealing is wrong, should we align with that and do anything we can to follow it, regardless of what our instincts are telling us?

Or can we agree that there is no true north in morals and therefore no absolute right or wrong?