I'm glad that no one was harmed, I'm even glad that the guy was rescued. And I can even give him credit for thinking a bit outside the box. But...the ends justifying the means isn't a valid defense for his actions.

I don't assume anything about rural communities and their ability or inability to deal with a loss of electrical power, that's why the actions of the guy in question are even less morally acceptable to me.

If one assumes that "well it's a rural community, they're probably used to losing their power..." that's simply an attempt to rationalize an illegal and immoral act. Only by not assuming anything, good, bad or indifferent about the folks who's power was lost can we make a valid judgement about the morality of the act in question. The illegality of it isn't even in question.

In my own case, I would assume the worst case scenario, that my selfish act is going to harm someone thus I wouldn't do it. Assuming anything else is, as I've stated too many times now, simply rationalizing, as the person who cut the lines down had no way of knowing what sort of problems his act might have caused.

I think examples like this get right to the heart of what "survival" is all about. We can choose to live our lives in a moral fashion or we can drop all the pretense and admit that we think laws and morality are for other people.

And "Adventureboy", when your survival encroaches on my and my families right to live peacefully, especially the killing part, you've already lost the argument. You have no more right to "survive" than anyone else and committing crimes and immoral acts in order to do so is still wrong, regardless of what some clown named M4040 may claim.

Art, you bring up some valid points, the best one I think supports my thesis, albeit in an ironic fashion, if the community in question is used to having the power go out, they wouldn't necessarily think to check the lines in time to save the guy in the first place. They'd assume that the loss of power was just another regular event and not the desperate cry for rescue that it in fact was. Shades of a Roald Dahl short story there.