Thou shalt not steal: Theft, fraud abound today

What's become of the Eighth Commandment: "Thou shalt not steal"?

Stories of stealing and murder are featured nightly on television news. Business executives are in jail for taking money from company coffers. The music industry is prosecuting teenagers who burn copies of songs off the Internet.

Because of an increasingly complex and materialistic society, religious and community leaders say the definition of stealing has blurred the past few decades, and examples of true honesty are harder to find.

Steve Albrecht, associate dean of the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University, has been studying fraud, white-collar crime and business ethics the past 32 years. He says studies show dishonesty is increasing because of poor role models and a lack of training from parents and other leaders.

"The problem is, if you want to teach children or employees to be honest, you do it two ways: model the behavior and second, teach and train," he said. "Unfortunately, more bad modeling is more accessible than ever before."

Jonathan McPherson, a recent college graduate who works for Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., said in an e-mail interview that he believes people have "been trained from childhood to put our focus on things (not people or ideas)."

"We don't teach kids basic human ethics; we teach them to observe rules," he said. "If the rules are unclear or don't make sense, out the window they go, and everyone does as they see fit."

In 2003, McPherson wrote a blog at jmcpherson.org/peertopeer.html about how he believed file-sharing over the Internet was against the spirit of the Eighth Commandment. He chastised fellow Christians for justifying the theft of music online because "everyone was doing it."

"There seems to be a pervasive opinion among Christians that sin is OK as long as it's small, everyone does it and they can't see any immediate consequences — all of which are the case for illegal swapping of copyrighted material," he wrote. "Certainly all sin makes us into sinners, but honestly, as Christians, what is our goal with respect to sin — to enjoy it as long as we can justify it or to pursue righteousness?"

Albrecht believes even good, "moral" people will steal, given the right circumstances. He points to Enron, WorldCom and Tyco as examples where executives and business people were unable to translate "basic ethical understanding" to their jobs and got caught taking millions from their employees and investors.