Imagine this: you have just
finished grocery shopping and are in the parking lot trying to find your car, when
you see a $50 bill lying on the ground by your feet. You bend down to pick up
the bill, and turn in it your hands making sure it’s real. It’s real. What do
you do? Do you walk back into the store and turn it in to the lost and found?
Do you keep it and walk to your car? Do you wait there hoping its owner will
return looking for it?
Most people like to say that they
would immediately head back into the store and turn the money in, but there are
also many people who wouldn’t be so quick to give the money back in real life.
The only ways to approach this dilemma are considering the options and weighing
the consequences.
As a high school student, these
kinds of ethical dilemmas are especially interesting to me. As someone who
currently spends most of my waking hours in a controlled environment like a
school, I am bombarded with ethical decisions every day of my life, whether it
be the opportunity to copy a homework assignment from a friend or the option to
take a shortcut on a cross country practice run. The consequences of these
actions may not be severe, but the actions themselves present opportunities for
me to analyze important aspects of my own character. How strong are my
principles? How badly do I want to succeed? What do I place importance on?
That’s really what this blog is
about. The value to considering ethical dilemmas likes these is not finding the
“right answer” or even figuring out what you would actually do when placed in
an similar situation; it’s about evaluating options and discovering what you and
the society around you places value on.
For someone who places a lot of value in having strong principles, it
would make sense to turn the money into the lost and found. However, someone
who values practicality may decide to take the money believing that anyone who
would be careless enough to drop $50 without noticing it must not really need
it and will definitely not be returning to the lost and found to find it.
Neither of these responses is necessarily
the wrong answer, and both situations can be made more complicated by adding
context. What if when the first person turns the money into the lost and found,
it is claimed by someone who it does not belong to anyway? What if the second
person who took the money donates it all to charity on the way home? Now which choice is the “right”
answer? It is still unclear, but the context has accomplished two things: 1)
has established even more about the two people’s character and 2) made this
dilemma a much more interesting scenario to analyze.
This blog will be a place to
examine the relevant ethical dilemmas of the time as well as their contexts. I
of course, have no real authority in the ethics field, but hope that I will be
able to provide a unique perspective on these issues and hopefully inform and
interest you with as many ethical dilemmas as I can assemble here.
