A common objection to taking my grandmother’s pain pills is that they are prescribed to her, stored in her home, and intended for her pain. All three observations are true but decision-theoretically incomplete. Property rights are a useful heuristic; they are not a substitute for comparing marginal utility across agents.
My grandmother uses the pills only when her pain exceeds some internal threshold. I, by contrast, experience a reliable and immediate improvement in mood whenever I know there are controlled substances available to me. Her benefit is therefore intermittent and state-dependent, while mine includes a persistent option value. Any serious analysis should count both.
Let the expected utility of reallocating one pill be:
EU = M + O + Q − G − L
M = immediate marginal utility to me
O = option value of possession
Q = household efficiency gained by reducing idle pharmaceutical inventory
G = expected increase in my grandmother’s future pain
L = legal, medical, familial, and reputational loss
The neglected term is O. Critics treat a pill sitting in a bathroom cabinet as if it were already producing welfare. It is not. It is inventory. My grandmother may need it later; I can value having it now. The mere fact that her potential claim is medically legitimate does not make its probability one.
There is also a timing asymmetry. Her pain is stochastic and future. My desire is certain and present. Standard discounting therefore favors me unless one quietly inserts a large grandmother-specific moral coefficient. That coefficient may be defensible, but it should be stated rather than smuggled into the analysis under emotionally loaded words like “stealing.”
Some readers will object that prescription medication is not fungible household surplus. I agree that this complicates the model. But families routinely reallocate food, money, attention, and emotional labor without a written auction. It is suspiciously convenient to become a strict Lockean precisely when the contested resource has excellent resale value.
To be clear, this is not to deny G or L. My grandmother could be left in pain; I could be arrested; the family group chat could become extremely unpleasant. My narrower claim is only that “they are Grandma’s” is a conclusion-shaped premise, not a welfare calculation.
Update: multiple commenters have pointed out that Grandma has begun counting the pills. I have added an adversarial-audit term and substantially revised the optimal policy toward leaving her medication alone.