16. Shoplifters' Christmas gift

"My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift," says Father Tim Jones of the Anglican Church, providing a seasonal spiritual boon to the half-incher worrying about his heavenly credit risk. Not of course, that tea-leafin' is a good thing, says the Father, but if you're faced with starvation, better that you knock off Tesco's than Granny Smith in Tesco's carpark (see the Guardian news story here).

No surprise that Tim Jones doesn't understand the essential character of moral integrity - after all, he believes in a fairy tale character looking down on us all with a benign smile, ready to say 'there, there, there' or 'burn, baby, burn' depending on what mood he's in.

Jones is right, or would be, if this is what he meant: that there's nothing wrong in principle from stealing from anybody or any institution that will not experience any suffering from your action. Indeed, many a famous moral philosopher (J.S. Mill, for example) has argued that it would be a moral obligation to do so if your suffering would be eased at less expense than some other's (or society's) would be increased. When it comes to starving versus Tesco's not being able to account for the loss of a tin of beans in its annual accounts, Tesco's doesn't have a moral leg to stand on.

There's no need to invoke the slippery slope argument here that 'but then we'd all start doing it and Tesco's would soon go out of business', for the simple reason that the argument and its rebuttal, along with Jones, utterly miss the real point about morality.

Morality is not about doing what some people who wrote a collection of verses some thousand or more years ago said you should do according to their idea of the creator of the universe, nor is it doing what is best for the most people, nor is it doing one's 'moral duty' (whatever that is), and nor, obviously, is it doing what is legal. Morality is about acting within the confines of your own integrity. What sort of a person do you want to be? A thief, a helpless victim of circumstance with no control over your own life? or an agent of power capable of supporting yourself and earning the love and respect of people you in turn love and respect?

Stealing indicates you either have not matured enough to understand your own moral responsibility to yourself, or that you do not have the courage to find solutions that you can be proud of to get out of your predicament.