Friday, September 2, 2005

Joe Raedle / Getty Images Don Taylor uses a sword to keep looters away from inside the Biloxi, Miss., pawn shop he was hired to guard.

Looting raises ethical concerns

Stealing of necessities, luxuries runs rampant as New Orleans loses its rules and structure.

By Erin McClam / Associated Press

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As New Orleans has descended into chaos, desperate residents have stolen ramen noodles, loaves of bread, cases of soda -- basic survival needs in a painfully empty city. Others have taken jewelry, TVs and even guns.

The devastation left behind by Hurricane Katrina has raised difficult questions of ethics: When, if ever, is looting OK? What happens when law itself breaks down?

In New Orleans on Thursday, Monica Laguard sobbed almost uncontrollably as she placed items she had taken from a store's shelves into plastic garbage bags to take them to her shelter in a nearby school.

She was taking children's clothing and snack foods. She could not find water. "I've got to get back to my children," she said. "I've got to get back to my children."

Ethicists and social psychologists said that rules of human behavior -- including respect for others' property and for social order itself -- dissolve quickly in desperate circumstances like the storm's aftermath.

"Obviously stealing things like TV sets or beer or any items that aren't crucial for survival, that's a nonstarter," said Mark Bernstein, a professor of applied ethics at Purdue University. "There would be no ethicist in the country that would think that's proper behavior."

But he quickly made an analogy: If the only pharmacy nearby were closed, and it had a drug your mother needed to stay alive, breaking into the pharmacy would be the right thing to do.

"If it's truly for survival ... I think you have an obligation to your family that is at least as strong as the respect you have to pay other property owners," he said.

In the first days after New Orleans flooded, local police took a relatively relaxed attitude toward refugees stealing food, water and other necessities. The police chief and mayor said they understood people were trying to survive.

But as the looters have grown more brazen, law enforcement has begun to crack down, especially when thieves have taken guns or preyed upon innocent people with food and water.

By Thursday, National Guard, state and local police were deployed from search-and-rescue operations to restore order to the city.

Jan Boxill, associate director of the Parr Center for Ethics at the University of North Carolina, draws a clear line: Looting on its face is wrong because it's stealing.

But she said New Orleans appears to have regressed into what ethicists call the state of nature -- an atmosphere without rules or infrastructure, where the needs are so great that anything goes.

"It isn't that it justifies it," she said, "but where there's no laws that can help anybody, one way or the other, obviously people need what they need to survive."

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, said some people might see widespread looting and not want to be left out -- to "feel like a sucker."

He compared it to sitting in traffic and watching people zoom past on the shoulder of the road: "We curse that person. But then another person goes by, and another, and we say, 'If everyone else is doing that, I'm going to, too.'"

Associated Press Staff Writers Kevin McGill and Wendy Benjaminson contributed to this report.