Question

For each of the following kinds of laws, pick at least one of the four grounds for justification—legal moralism, the harm principle, legal paternalism, and the offense principle—and construct an argument designed to justify the law. You may not agree either with the law or with the argument; the exercise is to see if you can connect the law to the (allegedly) justifying principle. For many laws, more than one kind of justification is possible, so there can be more than one good answer for many of these.

Laws against shoplifting

Answer 1

Legal Moralism of laws against shoplifting:

When a customer or the sales staff tries to get unlawful possession of the items in the store or try to embezzle the things from the store they will become vulnerable to the penal charges of Shoplifting acts.

The acts of shoplifting particularly refers to retail stores. Many states created their own statutes for shoplifting in specific. Shoplifting depicts the cheap mindset of the person trying to attempt the crime.It shows the lack of Minimum ethical values of a person.On the other hand, Most of the businessman in any state are having medium scale retail stores. Hence, In my opinion laws against the shoplifting, in the sense, laws which punish the thefts of things from stores are very useful, helpful to the retailers to run their business for long time. Also, there is obvious need to create morale in the minds of the people intending to commit crimes, Hence a punishment for the wrong doing is nothing wrong.

But, In many Statutes made by the states , a misdemeanor is punished with Imprisonement of the person. A Minor act should not be punished with Imprisonement unless the thing which the person tried to steal is of very high value like gold or diamonds.

Every case should be seen into in a subjective manner, instead of going blindly with the laws. Penalty/ Punishment/Probation should be imposed after taking in to concern the magnitude of the crime commited by the person. The statues gave powers to impose penalties by the shop keepers on their own decissions, which the shop keepers should not misuse.In many cases, when the persons get caught while trying to conceal the things or items the punishments are stil more stringent which in my opinion is not justifiable. If a person actually steals and at later point, if he gets caught, he can be subject to stringent punishment. But, in a case where aperson gets caught while commiting the crime can be punished with penalties instead of Imprisonement.

To conclude, Strong morale can be created by punishing the person commiting the act of shoplifting depending on the magnitude of the crime.