Theft

Overthink

Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2026

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Thou shalt not miss this episode! In episode 173 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk about theft. They discuss our moral intuitions around theft, how feudalism and capitalism may be founded upon an original (and large scale) act that of theft, and the gendered association between kleptomania and women. They also critique the lack of legal repercussions for tech companies that steal information to train new AI models. Finally, they look at representations of theft and capital in film and television. What does the move from heist films to grift docudramas say about 21st century capitalism? And why do we love to take the side of thieves? In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts discuss the ethics of stealing from large corporations.

Works Discussed:

Elaine Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store

Anna Kornbluh “Falling Heists, Rising Grift: Filming Capital in the Already Long Twenty-First Century”

Robert Nichols, Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Overthink.
0:19.2	The podcast where your two favorite philosophers steal the show by putting ideas in dialogue
0:25.2	with everyday life.
0:26.9	I'm Ellie Anderson.
0:28.6	And I'm David Pena Guzman.
0:30.3	And as always, for an ad-free extended version of this episode, community discussion, and
0:34.9	more.
0:35.5	Subscribe to Overthink on Substack.
0:37.8	We all learn as kids that stealing is wrong.
0:41.4	Maybe you grew up hearing, as I did, thou shall not steal as one of the Ten Commandments,
0:46.4	for instance.
0:47.4	But one of the weird things is that we also tend to have a deeply ingrained moral intuition
0:52.5	that stealing is not always wrong. So let's say you get
0:56.6	lost in the woods and you're going to die of starvation unless you steal some food from a 7-Eleven.
1:04.1	Most people would agree that your theft is justified in that case. Yeah, from the 7-Eleven in the middle of the woods where you're starving with no human
1:15.0	connection, but magically there is the 7-Eleven.
1:16.6	Okay, okay, okay, fair.
1:18.7	Okay, well, maybe you're like in the woods and then you stumble upon a main road that has
1:23.9	a 7-Eleven, you realize it was nearby all along.
1:26.5	Or, okay, maybe it's a farmhouse.
1:28.3	There's like a nearby farmhouse. And you can see a little light on. There's a fire going. You know somebody's there. You wait until they go to sleep and then you steal from them. You're like, I'm correcting this image to the teeth. I know, but your point is well taken, though. This dual moral intuition that you're talking
1:46.0	about highlights two polls of our moral lives, right? So on the one hand, yes, it is uncontroversial
	...

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