If you deliberately scan one fewer lemon than you are taking at the self-checkout at Whole Foods, you might be “microlooting.” This newly coined term does a nice job of distinguishing the highly punishable crimes of shoplifting and looting from what would be going on in a “sneak an extra lemon after buying others” situation.
The term “microlooting” was coined in a New York Times Opinion podcast. The “micro” in mircolooting makes it clear that the amount being taken must be objectively trivial. Of course, shoplifting might involve trivial items, too. And neither is an interest in destroying the business, or in causing much harm (a commonly shoplifted item is baby formula). The difference is that a shoplifter might be motivated by anything at all, from need to habit to thrill. A microlooter is motivated in a distinct way: it’s fairness. You are microlooting that lemon if you think the corporation you are transacting with deserves at least a lemon less than what they are charging. It is a small (“micro”) rebellion against our commercial system and its pricing.
The defining feature is not need or self-interest, but the belief that our economic system is a bit unjust and the pilfered item functions as a bit of correction. This would mean it is not experienced by the actor as low-minded but as a high-minded, symbolic protest.
This idea has raised the hackles of a slew of cultural commentators. To them, the idea that petty theft could ever be high-minded is insincere, hypocritical, and dangerous.
Microlooting is not just about swiping an extra lemon
For example, Thomas Chatteron Williams, writing in The Atlantic, insists that The Times’s “very silly conversation” about microlooting is what leads to the law itself losing “its legitimacy.” The mechanism is this: if “political and economic elites” are said to “violate” or are even “perceived” to “violate” the “social contract,” then “ordinary people become entitled to ignore rules as they see fit.” Tolerance of microlooting, Jonathan Turley agrees, is the “morality of mayhem.”
The accusation goes: those trying to get us to soften up on takes on theft, even in the roundabout way that is done in The New York Times podcast that started off all of these reactions, are wealthy hypocrites toying with a “luxury belief” that fails to acknowledge (even) their need for staid moral categories and shared condemnation of immoral behavior.
But my criticism is that these reactions to the proposed concept of “microlooting” read more like moralism than philosophy. Moralists see themselves as protecting social norms and are trying to sway others. So, they pile on as many intimidating insults (“moral turpitude”!) and fears (“moral decay”! the “social contract”!) as they can. Moralistic outrage is provocative and fun to read but at odds with the idea that we are only moral when we come to understand what we are doing by taking up big questions.
Ethicists are philosophers, and in contrast, they are concerned to share the basis for their claims, not just their conclusions. Philosophy is not a rallying cry, but the examination of all sorts of behaviors that might normally pass without scrutiny. In this case, the question is: do corporations get enough feedback from us about what we expect from them? Why we pay for a lemon at a corporate checkout is a great question. And symbolic protests are not laughable. Some of our political heroes, credited with bringing down oppressive systems, have recommended symbolic protest. In The Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel pointed out that personal integrity is strengthened by symbolic protests, and that people are moralized by the sense that they are not all “pretending” that the system is just any longer. And of course, it is strange to see, in the US, the idea of any type of protest over prices derided.
Furthermore, the question that animated The New York Times’s podcast: how to be moral in an immoral society is a great question and, in fact, the question that got philosophical ethics going in the first place.
Using critical thinking to figure out ethics
Let me quickly illustrate how an ethicist would encourage an “ordinary person” when it comes to microlooting. (7) She would ask, first, for microlooting to be placed into a claim about the good of symbolic protest in the face of our corporate pricing mechanisms. For example, microlooting could be considered in this form: “It would be good to get around this paywall to read news because it means I am refusing to be inattentive to how unjust it is for a society to not provide access to news.” Or maybe: “I claim some ownership of this news.”
So much can be invited in response if claims are put in this way. For example, the role news plays in a free society will need some accounting. And any initial answer will be challenged: the reporter and journalist will balk at the idea that their work is owned and explain how pay for a story supports the entire industry.
Ethics and Morality Essential Reads
Similarly, with microlooting, the risk of prices rising for other customers will factor in. And the big question of whether our current economic policies are working and fair, and by what measures, arises. Contra the recent critics of the discussion of the ethics of microlooting, such questioning is a good thing, does not presume a negative answers, and is good for us as moral agents and for our society. The question of what makes a market a functioning one is complex and even economists ask for our participation in trying to answer.
This approach is a way to dismiss Turley’s suggestion that microlooting can only be endorsed by those using “feelings” and “anger” instead of actual moral justification. The above is the process of actual moral justification, and ordinary people engage in it all of the time.
Virtue ethics on microlooting
The conclusion I think a philosophical ethicist would draw, if considering microlooting, would not be based on the cumulative impact of it, as that is hard to establish with this issue. It would also not be something that relied on a flimsy account of moral psychology that suggests every neighbor we have using someone else’s Netflix password is a moral degenerate.
An ethical theory like virtue ethics would instead be focused on how, to microloot, you must hide your behavior and the implications of that. Yes, there are societies like that Havel lived in where hiding rebellion is one effective way to get it done. But that is not our situation here in the U.S. (yet).
Where I think a person following virtue ethics would have trouble justifying microlooting is not in recognizing that our market system needs reform and that the corporations’ offering prices are not following fair or agreed-upon principles. Transacting with these corporations can very easily be something consumers regret, even while doing it.
Articulating the benefits we get from markets and understanding that, as we transact with corporations, is how virtue ethics suggests we begin to experience more than regret and mixed feelings.
The rub would be that microlooting is done in a surreptitious way. Typically, this is not the way we come to approve of our own behavior. We feel ashamed of things we hide. In this situation: corporations getting very little feedback from consumers on ethics, we do not yet have reasons to hide. A virtue ethicist would suggest we should be a little braver, a little louder, a little more investigatory and active, than just taking that extra lemon.
What type of behavior is appropriate in reaction to a pricing system that seems unfair? That is what a virtue ethicist would recommend, not just what feels brave and rebellious, but what actually is. If we do not have the means to figure that out together, we “ordinary people,” then virtue ethics suggests that no one else does, either.
