Alright, so the thing about the cookies and the cookie jar up in the original post: for the point the parent was trying to make, it was not actually contrived and the reason for that is because you can replace that specific example with about a billion other minor slightly unethical examples that also shouldn’t be illegal and his point still stands.
Where it gets contrived is when you start talking about hypothetical socialist cookie jars policed by tyrannical municipal governments or collector’s cookies. You steal $10K worth of cookie products off the shelf, that’s robbery. You take a single pack of cookies off the shelf: that’s petty theft, and if you eat all the cookies your mom or roommate made and leave none for anyone else, then you’re just an asshole. Strangely enough the law is quite capable of making distinctions.
What the law is not capable of doing though is giving people without a moral compass a moral compass, or aligning differing moral compasses from different cultures. For all the nuances the law can make, it’s still just a sledgehammer in the face of human behavior and social custom is how we self-govern ourselves the vast majority of the time without involving sheriffs and courts and legislators. Every time the law takes something governed by social convention and puts it into the hands of the courts, private society loses a little part of itself to the people with the bigger guns for good or for ill.
Where it gets contrived is when you start talking about hypothetical socialist cookie jars policed by tyrannical municipal governments or collector’s cookies. You steal $10K worth of cookie products off the shelf, that’s robbery. You take a single pack of cookies off the shelf: that’s petty theft, and if you eat all the cookies your mom or roommate made and leave none for anyone else, then you’re just an asshole. Strangely enough the law is quite capable of making distinctions.
What the law is not capable of doing though is giving people without a moral compass a moral compass, or aligning differing moral compasses from different cultures. For all the nuances the law can make, it’s still just a sledgehammer in the face of human behavior and social custom is how we self-govern ourselves the vast majority of the time without involving sheriffs and courts and legislators. Every time the law takes something governed by social convention and puts it into the hands of the courts, private society loses a little part of itself to the people with the bigger guns for good or for ill.