Rocsteady wrote:Jenuall wrote:Rocsteady wrote:Either people in here have never heard of moral relativism or have never done anything wrong in their lives. Taking advantage of a 40 buck package arriving at your door from a multinational that avoids taxes on tens of billions is hardly robbing a granny's priceless jewels.
Yeah, that's not what moral relativism means.
Regardless, Amazon being a company that doesn't operate correctly with regards to tax laws does not justify an individual taking something that doesn't belong to them.
It is. "Moral Relativism (or Ethical Relativism) is the position that moral or ethical propositions do not reflect objective and/or universal moral truths, but instead make claims relative to social, cultural, historical or personal circumstances."
Quite obviously it does fit into this context when discussing goods from Amazon or other specific sources.
Moral Relativism has several interpretations, but the most common form is the understanding that what person A believes to be moral may not be the same as what person B thinks.
Your comment, or at least how it reads to me (apologies if I have simply misread what you have put), is suggesting that stealing from Amazon is okay because they are a "a multinational that avoids taxes on tens of billions". That in itself is not moral relativism - it's not a mechanism for justifying the morality of one action by contrasting it with the morals of the effected party.
The fact that various people in this thread have disagreed as to whether keeping incorrectly delivered goods from Amazon is the right thing to do is an example of Moral Relativism.
Rocsteady wrote:So you've never done anything as bad as not notifying an incomprehensibly large company with dubious moral practices that a cheap package has mistakenly landed in your house, with no way of notifying the correct recipient?
Now this really is Moral Relativism - what constitutes something that is
as bad as this example will differ from person to person. Clearly I think that not taking steps to notify the sender that they have made a mistake is wrong, and yes on the few occasions when I have been delivered someone else letters or parcels I have either returned them (where a return address is given), contacted the sender (where it is obvious who the sender is) or simply put them back in the post box with a "Not known at this address" note on them.
In my judgement the moral practices of the sender are irrelevant - the person being inconvenienced by the mistake is not Amazon who may or may have dubious business practices, but some unknown individual who I have no real choice but to assume is a "Good Person" and therefore should receive the common courtesy of me helping them out a little to be re-united with their package.
What I think is a more interesting question in all of this is how many of the people who are saying it is fine to keep the item and do nothing about the mistake because Amazon are basically evil are actually still buying things from Amazon? If you think their way of operating is morally or ethically dubious then why still do business with them?