One of the things my criminal law professor did REALLY REALLY well was teach us to distinguish between WHAT SOMEONE DID and WHAT THE VICTIM EXPERIENCED.

If someone takes your wallet because they think it’s theirs, the action may not be legally theft. It doesn’t change the fact that your wallet was taken against your wishes, and that you had to do *all* the things that result from having your wallet taken.

The question of a perpetrator’s intent is often criminally relevant, and it should be—we think less harshly of people who do harmful things by accident.

But that does not negate the harm that they do, and attempts to confuse the two—to imply that the victim’s consent is irrelevant if the perpetrator’s intent is not there—minimizes the harm that occurred.

If you accidentally take someone’s wallet, you may not be a thief.

But if you don’t feel badly and apologize for making someone have to order all new credit cards, and if you don’t try to repay the cash you accidentally spent, you’re morally a jerk.

Outside of the criminal context, there are reasons why you might prioritize impact over intent. For instance, in a workplace setting, an employer may reasonably decide that creating workplace disruption, no matter what someone intended to do, is a sufficiently negative thing.

I’m trying to imagine a situation in which the New York Daily News would argue it’s horrifically unfair to terminate a cook who accidentally set a kitchen on fire, just because they didn’t MEAN to do it.