How do you know you're a person open to reason?

[wufwugy]

Theft does not exist outside of law.

TIL that the law is the arbiter of reality.

Theft as a social concept does not arise because it is a legal concept; it arises as a legal concept because it is a social concept.

[JKDS]

TIL that the law is the arbiter of reality.

Theft as a social concept does not arise because it is a legal concept; it arises as a legal concept because it is a social concept.

Go ahead and try to define theft without invoking property rights.

Go ahead and try to define property rights without invoking some rule making body.

[MadMojoMonkey]

TIL that the law is the arbiter of reality.

Theft as a social concept does not arise because it is a legal concept; it arises as a legal concept because it is a social concept.

It's interesting that you resort to sarcasm in this, of all, threads.

Theft arises as a legal concept because of the social concepts of property and ownership. The concepts of property and ownership are fabrications of a human mind which wants to control its environment. The legal framework of theft arises after humans formulate a regulatory system which defines property and the limits of ownership.

Bear in mind that property and ownership is a perfectly arbitrary fabrication which is popular in modern cultures. However, it is much lamented that America got its land because it displaced people from said land. Those people did not believe (or even understand) that land could be property. The notion of property of said land was explained to them when they were killed for going where they'd always gone.

So property is a conceit - and one that not all human cultures adopt.

So the idea that "taking" is the same as "theft" on some deep, human level is demonstrated to be false.