Money, Morals, Ethics and Big Decisions
So, what would you do if you were put into one of those classic situations where you find money that isn’t yours? I will give you three different scenarios.
Scenario 1: You find twenty dollars on the sidewalk. No one is around.
-Basically the answer to this seems pretty easy. It is impossible to determine who the $20 belongs to, so the money is now yours. If you feel guilty about it, then feel free to donate it to the Children’s Hospital or the Humane Society or whatever your choice of charity would happen to be. If no guilty, spend it on a special whatever for yourself for being so lucky. I guarantee that the person who lost it will be kicking themselves but oh well, that’s just how things go I’m told.
So, that was easy, let’s move on to scenario 2: You find a wallet. It has money in it, also some cards and a state ID. So, this time you still found money, but now you know to whom the money belongs. So, basically you have three options. A: take the money, leave the wallet where you found it, maybe the person who lost it will come back and find it and anyway, it’s finders keepers, right? B: Try to contact the person to give the wallet back unmolested by your filthy money grubbing hands or give it over to the proper authorities and hope they do the right thing as well. C: Take the entire wallet and do what you will with it.
Once again, at least to me the answer seems very easy but to some people this is where the answer starts getting a little murky. Some people will feel that the “finders keepers” rule still applies, even though the person is now known to us. The idea is: that person was dumb enough to lose their wallet, I found it, I am entitled to it. For these people the real hard question is not whether to keep the money but what to do with the wallet. Do they chance leaving it there and possibly being discovered that they took the money? Should they just get rid of the evidence. Personally, since there is the aspect of guilt in both of those above questions, taking the money in either case is obviously WRONG!!!
Okay, 3rd scenario. This one is a little more tricky. You have found extra money in your bank account or in your pay check. You did not earn this money. It was a banking error. Are you entitled to keep the money? According to the law, you are not. And if you try to keep it, it is possible you will be tried for theft before a jury of your peers. This woman and her friend accidentally received a check for 2 million dollars from the state and promptly spent almost the entire thing. Then, the woman called a few weeks later to find out why she got such a large sum of money (feeling guilty?) and was told she had to return it. She told the state to contact her lawyer.
Something tells me that she is not going to win this legal battle. Basically, finding things that aren’t yours are exactly what I just said. They aren’t yours. It’s nice to find some money in the street, it is untraceable and very lucky for you. Not so lucky for the person who lost it. But when you can find the owner of the item, be it money or goods or whatever, what is the right thing to do? Why does it seem that people forget what it feels like to lose something when they find something else?
Sorry about the moral tirade. I just feel like sometimes if people just thought about the other person (even if it is a big business, even they started out small!) that the world would be just a little bit better. The bottom line is this: you really don’t know what you will do until you are in that situation. It doesn’t matter what you say you will do, it matters what you actually do.
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She’s just a dumbass for spending the money. You never screw with the government’s money I mean what the heck. Also how do you spend 2 million that fast, so stupid.
September 10th, 2007 at 9:54 am