Right and Wrong Part One
Monday, February 11th, 2008
Yesterday I went shopping for a few storage things. The store was going to close soon, so I hurried to the cash register to check out.
When I entered the isle, I saw a fifty dollar note on the floor. The cashier wasn’t looking for it and hadn’t noticed it. I looked at it for a moment, picked it up, and then handed it to the cashier telling him that I had found it on the floor.
I later told my husband about the fifty and received a reaction I didn’t expect at all. He told me I should have kept it. There was no one in the isle to identify as the person who had dropped it, it wouldn’t go to the cashier, and the store would simply absorb it without a second thought.
But… But…
He was right. The store would not miss or love that fifty, and my husband and I could certainly use the extra money. The greatest good for the greatest amount of people would have been to keep it, but it didn’t belong to me.
The definition of moral is “concerned with principles of right and wrong or conforming to standards of behavior and character based on those principles”.
But what is right and wrong? Would it have been wrong for me to keep the money?
It’s not always a clear matter of black and white to know what is right and what is wrong.
More to come later…
