You’re pacing back and forth outside your favorite restaurant and talking on your cell phone as you wait for your friend Terry, who’s meeting you for lunch. Terry shows up, reaches down to the sidewalk and comes up holding a $50 bill.
“Is this yours?” he asks.
You remember getting change for 100 that morning and, still finishing up your phone conversation, you check your wallet. No 50. “Yeah, that must be mine,” you say, thanking Terry as you take the bill and put it in your wallet.
After lunch, you go to your car, reach in your pocket for your keys, and come out with a $50 bill. You recheck your wallet—another $50 bill. You realize that you didn’t drop the 50, you merely misplaced it. The one Terry picked up off the ground wasn’t yours at all.
Now what do you do? Give the 50 bucks back to Terry or keep it for yourself?2
Grapple with the Gray
List two or three reasons in favor of keeping the 50.
List two or three reasons why Terry should get it.
Is there another option?
Having weighed the options, what would you do?
Gray Matters
The law requires you to make every reasonable effort to return lost money or property to its rightful owner. But that refers to a case where the owner can demonstrate ownership, like a wallet with ID, a monogrammed billfold, a distinctive bag, or an easily identifiable object. Since most people don’t memorize serial numbers or write personal notes on cash, a single bill can’t be traced to any specific owner. Consequently, there is a presumption of immediate ownership by the person who found it.
In this case, because the bill was at your feet it was reasonable for Terry to assume that it might be yours. When you couldn’t locate your own fifty, you were justified in assuming that indeed it was yours. There was no dishonest intent, and you did nothing wrong by accepting the bill.
However, had you not misplaced your own $50 bill, Terry would have rightfully kept the bill he found for himself. Therefore, once you recognize the error that brought the fifty into your possession, the ethical thing to do is return it to Terry.
The additional moral challenge here is that Terry will probably have forgotten the incident altogether by the time you discover your mistake—a mistake he will never know about unless he hears it from you. Moreover, the money wasn’t Terry’s to begin with and, perhaps, you would have looked down in another moment and discovered the bill yourself.
It’s easy to rationalize that keeping the fifty is a victimless crime—or no crime at all. Terry hasn’t lost anything and doesn’t think he has lost anything. And you played a part in the money’s discovery; if you’d been standing a few feet away in either direction, someone else would have happened upon the fifty.
The danger of rationalization is that we train ourselves to legitimize fraudulent behavior. By engaging in mental gymnastics to justify self-serving conclusions, we make it easier to blur ethical lines in cases where there’s less room for rationalizing, skewing our own moral compass and drifting toward the boundary between ethics and legality.
Returning the fifty to Terry contains its own rewards. He’ll be impressed with your honesty. More important, you will have strengthened your ethical muscles, making you better prepared to respond correctly to more precarious ethical dilemmas.
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2 Adapted from Y. Zilberstein. 2013. Veha’arev Na (Jerusalem, Israel: Philipp Feldheim).