A lie well placed in a situation of duress is a falsehood...not a true lie...so i agree on that premise.
A lie is by definition any statement that is intentionally false. A falsehood is a false statement, regardless of the intent when it is delivered. A lie includes intent to deceive; a falsehood does not. The fact is that in my analogy there
is an intent to deceive, but that intention is for good reasons. It's still a lie, my point is that saying that "lying is always wrong" is simply too black and white. And trying to assign semantic differences just to avoid tagging something a lie to keep that black and white definition doesn't really make a lot of sense to me.
Stealing something back that was or happened to be originally stolen is still stealing...other approaches could have been taken...so i disagree BC on this one.
I don't really think this makes any sense. Theft is essentially taking something that doesn't belong to you. Following that, let's do another experiment like the above:
1. Thomas has a Truck. His truck is red, and it has his company logo on it's mudflaps. He has fuzzy dice hanging from his rear-view mirror. He keeps a slip of his business cards in the middle of the dash.
2. Thomas is leaving for work. But darn, he forgot his tools! So he drives back, and leaving his truck idling in the driveway, runs inside to grab them. When he comes back outside, his truck is gone.
Curses.
A few days later, Thomas is walking along and sees a Red Truck in a parking lot. He get's closer. It has the same fuzzy dice. It has his company logo on the mudflaps, and his Business cards are sitting in the dash.
the truck belongs to him. Therefore, him running home and grabbing is spare keys and driving the truck home
is not stealing the truck. It's his truck. It would probably be a better idea to phone the police, not because the police have a magic wizard staff that let's you take your own posessions from a thief without it being theft, but because you probably want to make sure the person that stole it has to answer for doing so.
Arguably, you can just wait until they come outside. Probably best not to just punch them in the face though since the thief may have sold it to somebody who has no idea, or lent it to a friend or something.
of course, that's for cars. In my case, it was a bicycle. There was the same number of distinctions. After it was stolen, I saw another bike that was exactly the same. There was no doubt about it; every single detail was the same- in particular the slip of paper I had put within seat with my name on it. I had owned the bike for a few years prior and had become rather familiar with it. Even then I didn't trust it which is why I stuck the piece of paper inside- just to be sure if anything happened to it. It got stolen, one of my friends stumbled upon a bike that he said looked like mine, I went where he was, Everything looked exactly the same. Many specific details were the same as mine, including a slightly bent rear rim and a tear in one of the suspension covers. Even so, I took the seat off (which itself used another addition of mine involving a quick-release seat that was the same one I had on mine) and found the piece of paper with my full name on it. At this point, how can it even be considered "stealing' to take it?
That bicycle was mine. Personally everything else clinched it, the reason I put the paper in the seat was because while the others could by some bizarre coincidence be on another bike, only mine is going to have a piece of paper with my name on it.
I just don't see how anybody can- even subjectively- consider this "wrong".
