An event-space was hosting a Christmas party in London. I arrived late, maybe 10pm. They had oversupplied food, and a large cake, topped with strawberries, had been abandoned in the corner. Rather than cutting a slice of cake, I simply took a strawberry from the top. I turned to my friend and said “This is unethical”[1] and ate the strawberry.
Clopus45 initially tells me that taking the strawberry was fine, but after some back-and-forth we’ve agreed on this assessment: Strawberries are the scarce, desirable resource; cake is the abundant substrate. The intended allocation bundles them together. By taking a strawberry without cake, you claim more than your proportional share of the good stuff while leaving strawberry-depleted cake for others. You might argue you weren’t going to eat cake regardless—but someone else might have wanted a properly-topped slice. The strawberry you took was theirs. This is mitigated by the likelihood that the cake would go uneaten anyway, but not eliminated by it.
@Eli Tyre asked for an example:
An event-space was hosting a Christmas party in London. I arrived late, maybe 10pm. They had oversupplied food, and a large cake, topped with strawberries, had been abandoned in the corner. Rather than cutting a slice of cake, I simply took a strawberry from the top. I turned to my friend and said “This is unethical”[1] and ate the strawberry.
Clopus45 initially tells me that taking the strawberry was fine, but after some back-and-forth we’ve agreed on this assessment: Strawberries are the scarce, desirable resource; cake is the abundant substrate. The intended allocation bundles them together. By taking a strawberry without cake, you claim more than your proportional share of the good stuff while leaving strawberry-depleted cake for others. You might argue you weren’t going to eat cake regardless—but someone else might have wanted a properly-topped slice. The strawberry you took was theirs. This is mitigated by the likelihood that the cake would go uneaten anyway, but not eliminated by it.