Is stealing right or wrong

In the physical world that you can touch, right and wrong can sometimes be difficult to define or prove, however, cause and effect can be observed and proven, and I'm pretty sure that we can agree that living creatures want to survive. So, if you want to know if stealing is right or wrong, let's start from there.

You have the desire to survive and avoid suffering because you are alive. You have the strength to survive as a physically weak creature because of the intelligence of your ancestors to cooperate by living in groups. Intelligence lets you know that cooperation occurs more reliably when you can trust the people in your group.

Moral codes, civil codes, and even manners are constructed agreements that allow us to know what to expect from each other. This builds the trust necessary to use our minds to plan ahead, specialize, and succeed together in developing all of the modern comforts that we now enjoy. Dishonesty is typically forbidden because it undermines this trust in one other.

When we reduce the logic of this situation to its simplest terms, we see clearly that dishonesty brings death and pain closer to us. Death is the most undesirable condition for any life form. The only thing worse than a closer death, is an immediate death. We can now conclude with confidence, that the only logical use for dishonestly is to avoid immediate death.