The starving theft from the thoughts of Hegel and Kant

Abstract

This article starts from a news that was published in the media, in the year 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and which concerns the theft of two packages of instant preparation pasta from the Miojo brand, two Coca-Cola brand soft drinks and a powdered juice, totaling the value of R$ 21.69. The woman accused of this theft was arrested on September 29, 2021, and released by order of Minister Joel Paciornik, of the Superior Court of Justice (STJ), on October 12 of the same year. Having presented the facts, we intend to face the following problem: how would Hegel and Kant position themselves if they had to examine this situation, that is, for these philosophers, is there or is there not the excusability of the conduct attributed to this woman, mother of five children, considering that it is of starving theft? As a result, we verified that the positions of these philosophers go in opposite directions, and for Hegel, because it is an exception and that the law is relative in relation to Justice, it is possible to justify the unjust action in the presence of the “right of emergency” (Notrecht), this in order to avoid an even greater injustice; while for Kant “to recognize the universal validity of the moral law and to make an exception in its favor is to incur a contradiction”, therefore, for him, the formalism of the moral law must prevail, without exceptions.