Since when is even stealing anything excusable? Stealing $300 purse or $30000 car is exactly the same thing morally. The value of the item is in some ways orthogonal.
Theft should be punished in the strongest forms possible so no one even thinks about doing it. Minimum 1 year in prison for stealing anything.
Let's say someone steals a $300 purse or a $30000 car. Nobody needs either a $300 purse or a $30000 car. But let's say someone steals $10 of food from a grocery store. They may legitimately need that. (Or they may just have poor self-control.) If someone legitimately needs food, I could bend my mind far enough to call that "excusable".
Then the society should make provisions to directly provide food for the needy.
Allowing stealing is not tackling the problem head-on and instead squirming on a morally questionable line and thereby breeding crime and ill in the society.
That's perfectly reasonable to say that society should do that.
In the meantime, though, society doesn't do that, at least not consistently enough. So in the current circumstances, I still have some compassion for someone in genuine need who steals food.
And what of the local business owner who has invested his life saving in a business, and needs the income from the business to feed his family? How is it okay to let people steal from him because "it's only $10". Thats figuratively food being taken from his family's mouth.
