Today I had the chance to steal about 150 dollars from an 18-year-old girl named Zahraa. Scot-free, would have gotten away with it easy-peasy; nobody would have known.
Somebody had left their purse at a buss stop.
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I picked it up and obviously looked around. Saw nobody running, nobody in obvious search for a lost object. I opened the purse and saw that there was a bunch of stray cash and a wallet with some bank cards and ID.
I took the name and quickly started googling. From public records (yes, the Nordics are insane about this... All in the open) I could find somebody with her name, matching the age of the driver's license I held in my hand, registered in my city. (Google for phone number or her Facebook account unfortunately failed.)
Alrighty, what do I do now? I had a bus to catch myself, ultimately a plane, so wasn't exactly able to run across town and deliver a purse. (In hindsight, I DID have enough time... and push comes to shove, I probably would have made a detour to deliver a purse to someone.)
As if on cue, a police car drove by and I flagged them down. I explained what I found and that I hadn't located a phone number for Zahraa; they took the purse and thanked me, and I have fairly high confidence that Zahraa will eventually get her purse, cards, and cash back (Once they call her, or she calls them).
I'm not exactly out here bragging about moral honesty and integrity, but offering the surprise (and pride!) over my no-questions-asked reaction: it barely even occurred to me to take the cash.
If I had to guess, I probably wouldn't have done this in America, where cops might as well just take the cash and pretend it was their coffee money all along. Plus, social cohesion is lower in that country, trust in strangers much less so than what I'm used to (and, I might add, any sane human ought to aim for).
There, my morals might have been more flexy, and I would have taken the cash before ditching the purse somewhere: _someone else's problem_.
But here, in my town? In my lands? From an 18-year-old girl who had just gotten her driver's license a few months before, and for whom $150 is a decent sum. _uh-hu_, not happening.
I suppose, if I had know the cash was obtained through illegal means, or it was a larger sum — but not _too_ large... That's terrifying recipe for getting in trouble! — or the owner was a schmuck or some other circumstance surrounding the event, I again might have taken the cash.
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Enlightenment scholars and moral philosophers since Adam Smith have spoken about an inner voice, a compass, the honest morality of the impartial spectator — the chest, basically. It's nice to see that when put to the test, mine was there; my job, now saddled with someone's lost purse, was to ensure that it made its way back to its owner. NOT to (marginally) enrich me.
Today I had the chance to get myself a small payday by making the world worse. I would have had to live with that, knowing what I had done.
It was cool to see that at no point did I contemplate or hesitate: her purse and money are going back to her, hands down.
Bring goodness into the world, friends. Live well.
