Stealing From Corporations

As people steal basic items like food from corporations, some believe that this is not immoral or is even good.  To steal from a company, especially a megacorporation, might have hardly a noticeable impact in a specific case, and many businesses exploit their workers and client/customer base, they insist.  It is not true that a corporation is automatically predatory; this depends on the individual people involved in it and how it is run.  It is also not true that the nature of theft itself changes based upon the severity or situation.

Obviously, a person stealing from a grocery store to eat or a pharmacy to survive, driven by desperation and despair, is not committing as serious an act as a corporate leader who takes so much money from a business's earnings that the employees are not paid liveable wages.  The first is about survival marked by tragedy.  The second is about greed for the sake of egoistic emotionalism or taking from others.  These are very different forms of theft, and the latter is objectively far worse than the former.

Theft is theft no matter its manifestation, though, and thus one kind being less immoral than another would not mean it is ever permissible or good.  What is immoral in itself would still have this nature even when it is done with far less sinister, selfish, irrational motives.  If theft is morally wrong, then yes, stealing from corporations is also wrong no matter how small its impact on the company bottom line is, but this in no way makes it equal to the mass, devastating theft practices by many companies.

Resolving the genuine problems that make stealing from corporations so pragmatically beneficial (in some ways, it is, this just has nothing to do with moral obligation) is the way to best discourage the smaller theft other than adherence to a correct, rationalistic worldview.  For corporate greed, neither its philosophical invalidity nor amoral factors like public scorn (public approval or disapproval in itself has nothing to do with whether something is wrong, only if it is popular) are likely to deter an executive or employer with enough power to withstand any sort of human opposition.

The hypocrisy of condemning theft by corporations and supporting theft by consumers is glaring, although one is often far worse than the other.  Both of these things are true at once.  There are people who are emotionalistically in favor of either of these forms of stealing.  Like with murder or kidnapping, the core nature of theft is the same in one scenario and another.  People with fallacious hostility towards either consumers/employees or corporate leaders regardless of their personal status just do not like this.