Have you never felt guilty about something and then realized, perhaps after conversations with friends that might not have occurred, or with the perspective of the passage of many years, that you did not do anything wrong? Do you know that battered women often stay in relationships partly because of guilt? They judge their rejection of and anger at their partners as not being loving enough? It seems to me people are quite capable of feeling guilty on poor grounds and feeling fine about stuff that is really quite terrible. Even by their own later estimations. Ah, but then they worked it out in the end. Nah, life is short, who knows what we do not catch up on regarding.
Though perhaps if I explained that fiat banking necessarily deflates the value of the money the Amish got through labor, they would realize that their money is being stolen and interest is a fair replacement for this. Banks loan money they do not have. This puts more money out there without increasing labor as much as it does the money. This creates inflation and reduces the value of our money. What the heal is stealing, I still ask. The Amish have used guilt to prevent them getting fair compensation for their labor.
Ah, good so you see that conscience may not be a good guide. If you had died back then, you never would have realized that you had been stealing, by your own sense of what stealing can be. But the good thing about this is that you have just judged the norm as stealing. If the norm is stealing, this puts what gets called stealing in a context where being robbed is nearly impossible to avoid. If I am being robbed all the time, then my stealing to feed myself or my family is very different. It becomes more like a slave on a plantation taking from the master’s vegetable garden: risky but not immoral. I am not arguing that all stealing is OK, but rather pointing out that if we take your own definition of stealing on, we end up in a society where what stealing is is very hard to track and judge. That it might be OK, morally, to steal in terms of what the law considers stealing might be just fine.