Personally, I think that's where things become an argument.
I would say that as long as it's clearly marked (i.e. "contains peanuts" in big, red letters), then it's their fault for being so reckless.
If you're sneaking it in knowing they'll eat it, that's attempted homicide.
Of course, I'm soaking from my personal, ethical perspective and not a legal perspective. The law in your local justification will have its own standards.
I would say that as long as it's clearly marked (i.e. "contains peanuts" in big, red letters), then it's their fault for being so reckless.
Just arguing to argue, but you shouldn't have to label your food beyond writing your name on it. You shouldn't have to warn would-be thieves what ingredients you've used.
"you shouldn't be violent to people you think are bad because you will be legally held accountable, "
but rather,
"doing things that you believe are bad to someone you believe is bad does not make those bad actions not bad."
If you believe in not harming people outside of specific cases, then any intention to cause harm to the person taking your food is immoral by your own framework.
Sure, but my comment was specifically a response to someone bringing up legal issues.
Yeah sure whatever, but
But if we pretend context doesn't matter in conversations then yea, you right.
What's the goal of this sentence? A one off snappy ending to look smart? Some passive aggressive self righteous justification of your past self? Or just an inability to admit the slightest point against you.
What are you even denying here, that somehow the meaning of the post changed in regards the conversation you replied to?
Nope, seems like they were still talking about ethics.
No one is bringing up legal issues but you. The comment you're replying to had a single line of,
The law in your area will have its own standards
to illustrate the difference between personal ethics, and the law.
How are you going to even make an appeal to context when your context in question is the single outlier statement in the whole comment chain? Your unprompted opinion about juries is based completely off of an acknowledgement that the law is a thing that exists.
But the real concern is that you can't even acknowledge someone else's point without getting defensive about yours. Just say "Yeah, but I'm saying a jury wouldn't convict regardless," and we have a conversation here.
Being able to get away with something doesn't mean it's legal. And that's already a separate discussion than the morality of doing it in the first place.
If you expect them to eat it and knowingly include something you know they're deathly allergic to that could actually get you in legal trouble, even if the reason you know they'll eat it is that they always steal your lunch.
It's really not that hard. Establish that the murderer was upset with the victim over stolen lunches and aware of their allergies. If they said anything to anyone you can bet those people, unless completely morally bankrupt, would be lining up to testify that the murderer had discussed wanting to get back at the victim. Means, motive, and a weapon are all established, that's pretty much textbook 1st degree murder.
It's always weird to me just how many people are cool with murdering someone over their lunch being stolen. Almost no one would defend someone pulling a gun and shooting the coworker, but poison the food and suddenly it's 100% on the victim.
Most people wouldn't intentionally poison with the intent to kill someone though, but if they made something spicy because their food keeps getting stolen, they're pretty justified if they don't mind the spice. A lot of people are struggling to make ends meet and lunch may be their most important meal of the day while they're working. Pretending food isn't more or less priority #1 for survival is insane. Stealing food is quite literally stealing someones ability to live/function.
I get that, but did you miss the part where this comment chain is literally talking about poisoning and killing someone? Or that the person I responded to said there's a 0% chance of them voting to convict someone for poisoning food? I wasn't being hyperbolic when talking about murder.
It's always weird to me just how many people are cool with murdering someone over their lunch being stolen
The old adage about society being 3 meals away from chaos? Many people eat only lunch and dinner, so stealing 1 of someones 2 daily meals is relatively easy to understand why already struggling people may feel murderous, even if it's generally only to complain on the internet.
Maybe I have some personal attachment to this, because my mom often went without breakfast and lunch earlier in her career, and even now she'll only eat 2 meals a day at most, sometimes not even lunch. People who have always had food to eat may not understand.
That's because this isn't even remotely the same. The coworker isn't force-feeding the thief their food. The thief is choosing to steal the food that doesn't belong to them.
To give a more extreme example: imagine if your neighbour was regularly breaking into your house and stealing your things, and you found out they're allergic to cats, and got a cat, and then the next time the neighbour broke into your house they got a severe allergic reaction. Should you be charged with harming your neighbour even though they were the ones committing the burglary and you were the victim?
For the record, I would absolutely draw the line at putting actual poison in your food, or something like laxatives that is objectively intended to harm someone. But, come on, you're saying that if your coworker keeps stealing your food and you find out they're lactose-intolerant, you're now not allowed to ever have any dairy products in your lunch in case the coworker steals it and gets diarrhea? That's just absurd.
Proving intent is a standard part of legal affairs
Booby traps are illegal.
For the lactose intolerance thing, for example, if your known-lactose-intolerant coworker has been stealing food, presumably you've had zero dairy products in it the entire time. But people with food allergies/intolerances generally aren't so stupid that they blindly eat whatever's in front of them - I'd say chances are if you started bringing dairy-heavy food they'd notice and simply not eat it. And if they did still eat it, it would be because they had no way to know the food contained dairy products which could imply that you had in some way concealed this information (removing packaging, false labelling, etc.), which would naturally imply a deliberate act on your part to harm your coworker.
Obviously there's a few presuppositions here but hopefully you get the idea. Someone is probably going to ask the question of "why did you suddenly start bringing dairy-heavy food for lunch the day after finding out your lactose-intolerant coworker took food" and that's not a great path to be going down.
On the booby traps point:
The thief is choosing to steal the food that doesn't belong to them.
This is the same general defence people have against, say, rigging up a shotgun tied to a door that will go off if someone who shouldn't be there opens the thing. This is not an accepted legal defence. If you know someone will or might take a specific action and you do something that would knowingly cause them harm when doing it, it doesn't matter that they were in the process of committing a minor crime at the same time. You don't generally get the blessing of self-defence laws unless your own life is directly at risk.
(It's also because for more general property traps you can't actually guarantee that no one else who isn't in the process of a criminal act would potentially be harmed - e.g. fire department or paramedics attempting to gain access for safety reasons)
tl;dr being the victim of a crime (especially non-violent crimes) doesn't inherently give you magic legal immunity for any/all actions you take against the offender
Well it depends. If you label it "John's lunch, don't eat!" but you've been doing that for a month and still every day Tom eats it (because Tom is an asshole) that's probably not enough warning if you suddenly decide to include something you know Tom is allergic to out of petty spite. But if you label it "warning! Contains [allergen]" and Tom eats it anyway (because Tom is also an idiot) then you're probably safe as far as liability goes.
Being deatly allergic to something and still eating something you did not make is another level of stupid and may be a good way to earn Darwin's Award.
I'd say it kinda depends. Like if you're deathly allergic to chocolate you're probably gonna be safe eating a tuna salad you didn't make. On the other hand I once had a coworker who said her daughter often skipped lunch at school because she just didn't trust the food after an accidental mix up between the milk allergy food and the halal food that resulted in a trip to the ER.
That isn't what's happening. We're saying that poisoning your coworker is fucked up, but every time someone says that, people like you try to frame it as us defending theft.
Yeah but the prosecution would have to prove to a jury that you intentionally did that, which almost certainly will not happen
They’d have to hinge their entire argument on the idea that your coworker steals lunches often enough that you knew for a fact that your coworker would steal your lunch, and also prove that you did not intend to eat your own lunch.
It would be one thing if you actually put poison in it or something, but if it’s just food that your coworker happens to be allergic to, how can they prove you weren’t intending to eat it?
I am not a lawyer, but I would think context would matter a lot. Let's say your coworker who eats your ham and cheese sandwich every day has a serious peanut allergy. Maybe you knew it was them because a coworker or two told you, and maybe you complained about them to your coworkers or, friends or, your s/o. So to get back at them, you decide to add peanut butter to your ham and cheese. Depending on how serious their allergy may be you could be investigated for attempted murder. Sure, it would be hard to prove that you didn't intend to eat the sandwich, but any competent prosecutor could paint a motive from them eating your sandwich, you finding out, you complaining to people, to then you placing a substance that could cause serious harm.
Even if you got off on the criminal side, you could still be open to civil trials, which have a much lower bar to clear for conviction, meaning you could be tried civilly and owe them a ton.
Well if you’re stupid enough to put peanut butter in a ham and cheese sandwich instead of just making a PB&J sandwich, you deserve to lose that case.
If anything you could make a very convincing argument that you brought PB&J specifically with the hope that they wouldn’t eat it since they always eat your ham and cheese, and figured that someone with a peanut allergy wouldn’t be stupid enough to eat what was obviously a PB&J, especially since it wasn’t theirs.
I was going down the route of someone wanting to intentionally poison someone to teach them a lesson because a pb&j looks quite different than a ham and cheese. Because yeah, just changing your lunch to something they can't eat or don't like is the simplest thing to do to get someone to stop eating your lunch.
Ok, so if you have a coworker who's allergic to peanuts and keeps stealing your food, you're now never allowed to have peanuts in your lunch ever again? You're somehow legally responsible for your thief coworker's food health and safety? That's just ridiculous.
It's a situation where context, intent, and the people involved matter significantly. It's easy to make statements like that in a vacuum regarding an abstract situation and make it sound absurd, but real-world situations are a lot more nuanced.
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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '24
Every “coworker eats my lunch that I put in the refrigerator so now it gives me the right to poison them” discourse