You see a man rob a bank and get away. You follow the robber only to see he hasn't kept the money for himself but has donated it to an orphanage. The orphanage has been struggling for money and with it they can get the kids proper medical attention and keep them fed for awhile. However the bank that he robbed happens to be the one your best friend owns. There is a chance he may go broke due to this. If you report the crime all the money from the orphanage will be taken back to the bank.

What will you do?

Now see, your dilemna assumes I would follow the robber at all.

I would walk by the event, without a care in the world. I might report it to the police via cell or whatever, but it's not my business or problem.

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Assuming I "did" follow him whatever, for the sake of your post, I'd probably still report him to the police. Because the law is the law. If you break it, you deserve punishment. It doesn't matter to me if what you did was for a good reason, and in this case, it is.

But there's other ways to bring attention to things like this. In today's world, with the thanks of social networking, it's possible to spread information about a cause in a lot of different ways. Someone out there cares. It's not me, but someone out there will pitch in and help. It's just how people are.

The orphanage can keep the money.


IF my friend goes bankrupt, he can come live with me. It's the least I can do for not stopping the robber who was actually doing a fairly good deed.

Tough call for me, but I would call the police. If it's wrong to steal, it's wrong to steal. The name of the thread is what settled it for me: Robin Hood was not a hero, he was a thief. I don't care how good your cause, stealing something from someone and giving it to someone else is just wrong. The thief did the wrong thing, but with right motives. Still, it's wrong.


Look at it from this perspective: say for the sake of this argument, you have precisely $100,000 in the bank. This man steals your identity, drains your bank account and leaves you with precisely diddle ($0). You find out who did this, but also (somehow) find out that he is on his way to give the money to a charity that feeds homeless people with children. With no money in the bank, you can no longer make your house payments or car payments. Do you become homeless and lose your car, and in turn lose your job (good luck keeping a job when you have to sleep on the street with no way to bathe or shave), or do you report it? What if you have a wife and children? Do you let them end up sleeping in a box with you so this guy can feed other people with the money that would have fed and sheltered your family?

Simply put, wrong is wrong, regardless of how you slice it. Otherwise a hitman would be okay killing people for cash, so long as he used his money to help sick kids, because moral could right wrong decisions.

Just my two cents.

I absolutely despise the argument that "A thief is a thief".  Many times, there can be good reasons for things that would otherwise be faulty.  I usually don't talk much about aspects of my religion here on Vizzed (I'm a Mormon lol ), but there's one example in The Book of Mormon that's very pertinent, and it's one of my favorite stories.  

A bunch of folks (called Nephites) were in a war with another group of folks, called the Lamanites.  On one occasion during the war, an opportunity was presented.  A group of Nephites with a similar skin tone to the Lamanites came and deceived the Lamanites that stood over the city of Gid.  They made them drunk, then proceeded to take the entire city without shedding a drop of blood.

Would you say that that was wrong?  Would it have been more correct to kill these folks because lying "is always wrong"?  I can say that it most certainly is not, but in a perfect world, it would be unnecessary.  Secret agents lie to keep their cover.  They "steal" documents and other things to keep our country safe.

But then again, is that really stealing?

Now to bring the argument around full circle.  This man has stolen a great deal of money from your friend.  Your friend would likely suffer and go broke because the money is lost.  Of course, you could take him in, but he would still have lost the results of his hard, honest work.  In this case, the man is indeed a thief.  He has stolen something that another man has worked honestly to gain.  Could the children and owners of the orphanage sleep at night knowing that another man has been robbed for them to live?  Perhaps.  It largely depends on how generous your friend is.  Perhaps he would even let the theft go, despite going broke.

Consider the example of the bishop from Les Miserables.  I quote the Wikipedia article: "One night Jean Valjean shows up at his door, asking a place to stay the night. Bienvenu graciously accepts him, feeds him, and gives him a bed. Valjean takes most of Bienvenu's silver and runs off in the night. The police capture Valjean and take him back to face Bienvenu. When the police inform Bienvenu they have found the silver in Valjean's knapsack, Bienvenu tells the police that he had given them to Valjean as a gift. He chastises Valjean for not taking the silver candlesticks as well. After the police leave, Bienvenu tells Valjean to use the silver to become an honest man."

Consider that the punishment for the theft would have been quite severe.  Valjean had already done 19 years in prison for simply stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's children, a punishment that would have still been 5 full years had he not attempted escape.  The people who imprisoned him also used that terrible logic, "A thief is a thief", and must be punished terribly, no matter the severity of the crime.

But Jean Valjean did use the silver to become an honest man, thereby showing the great importance of mercy.  Mercy can turn hardened men into good, honest men, if they will but accept it.

supernerd117 :

It's not lying because it is war. If they weren't at war, it would be a lie and they would be thieves.

And that is my whole mentality when it comes to the vigilante. If society has rotten to the point where orphans are starving and the rich can party every day, then stealing from the rich to give to the poor is a just declaration of war. Essentially, you are revolting against oppression. And that is just fine. People like this recruit others to the cause, organize, and attempt to make change. It's exactly like war. Robin Hood was not a thief, he was a revolutionary.

However, in the example given, the man who was stolen from is not rich. Banks do not go under due to one robbery unless there are issues to begin with. The bank robber should have chosen a better target.

But would I call the cops? How bad is the situation? If the orphans are literally staving and dying from lack of health care, there would be no cops called. The friend would get my sympathies and whatever financial assistance I could give so he could eat and get health care. Then I'd probably go find someone else to rob too, donate it to the orphanage. If the orphanage isn't really hurting that bad, I'd call the cops. The friend is now hurting real bad, and he wouldn't be the right target for any Robin Hood justification.

legacyme3 : That is not the response that I would have expected from you. I know you are a liberal. I thought you would have been all for taking from the rich that worked hard for their money and giving it to the poor. Isn't that what liberals want?

I would definitely call the cops. Sure he has good intentions, but if he wants to help the orphanage he needs to give some of his own money. It is not ok to steal from others, even if you give the money away.

tgags123 :

That's a terrible thing to assume. Not all people who swing to the left want to take from the rich and give to the poor. I'm all for "aid" but there's a difference between taxation on a sliding scale, and literally stealing from a bank in order to make money.

There's a huge difference between what you speak of, and what the scenario is about.

legacyme3 : It is a terrible thing to assume that someone that favors the left agrees with a liberal opinion?

I understand there is a difference between the too. But not a huge difference. They are essentially the same idea, just one is on a much greater scale. One is taking money out of one's paycheck and giving it to the poor, while the other is robbing someone and giving to to the poor. They are very similar ideas, just that the bank one is more extreme.

As many peopel have said here, I woudl call the cops.  A broken law is a broken law, regardless of who broke it and for what reason.  Someone very early in this thread made a good point, which I think is just an example of how interesting our society has become over the last several decades.

Even if I turned the thief in, there'd be so much news coverage/ facebook gossip/ social media nonsense.... that I guarantee you that orphanage would see every penny of that back, plus more.

I would do nothing.

If the thief is eventually caught, then he is not a very good thief and deserves his punishment.
If the thief is never caught, then my friend should have invested in better security for his bank, and he deserves his bankruptcy.

But really, a Robin Hood scenario, intended to glorify the man who is redistributing wealth, is a deplorable one. If you are a thief, you obviously understand that you work outside the law. Giving your plunder to an orphanage may help out the orphanage, but it does not make you a hero.

tgags123 :
"I thought you would have been all for taking from the rich that worked hard for their money and giving it to the poor. Isn't that what liberals want?".
1st point as legacy stated, being liberal does not mean you favour redistributing wealth.
Maybe you do, maybe you simply favour greater liberty, equal opportunitys, pacifism.
Your 2nd assumption is that liberals take from those that work hard and give to those that do not.
Frankly many lowecclass break their backs daily to provide vital services to the economy. You may dismiss them, but your economy would collapse without them.
And being rich doesent make you a hard worker. For a start most wealth is inherited.

And to say scaled tax and robbery are similar is purely based on your bias.

As for the scenario it would be perfectly apparent to the orphanage where the money had come from, the notes would probably be marked too, making the money useless. At the end of the day they put other people's life in danger for that money, and its not ok. The police would have to be told. In this scenario however, they would be terrible police if they didn't already know.

Oh man, I hate this kind of thing because I really don't know what I would do. I guess it would depend on my mood on that day. If I felt sorry for the orphanage, I would probably let them keep it, but I would probably still tell my friend about it. The orphanage can't get in trouble since they weren't the ones that actually stole the money.

 I wouldn't follow him in the first place but let's say I did in which case I would probably report it so to not let my friend become poor.

Not to mention that if this story was told on the news someone would probably start a fundraiser for the orphanage meaning that they could have the money they needed with it being perfectly legal and at the same time my friend wouldn't become poor.

So in this particular case I believe you could have it both ways.

My friend can recover, especially since there's this new fangled invention called "insurance" and in this situation, I'd always pick the poor, sick starving children are much more important than my friend's Bugatti, but that's just me :3.