CAROLYN HAX

Dear Carolyn:

If I find a dollar bill on a city sidewalk, I pick it up and keep it.

My husband says I am stealing and should leave it where it is.

Given that there is nothing identifiable about a dollar bill, and its location is the sidewalk of a public street, I don’t see my picking it up and keeping it as stealing.

Am I right about this, or is my husband right? — Consider Myself An Honest Person

Dear Consider Myself An Honest Person:

What about a $100 bill?

Or, if you found thousands in cash on the street, then would your answer be different? Would his answer change if it were only a penny?

Would it make a difference if a found wad of cash was loose, or in an envelope? Plain, with just a bank logo, with a receipt or person’s name?

What if it weren’t cash, but, say, a gold chain or a diamond engagement ring?

It makes for an interesting thought experiment.

If it’s “stealing” to take a loose dollar bill off the sidewalk, then it’s stealing for a penny, too. Or a wad of cash.

That’s because your husband’s position (given what you shared) is absolute, and doesn’t make allowances for: the inherent value of the item, the degree of loss the original owner might feel, or the likelihood of reunifying the lost item with its true owner.

If it isn’t stealing to pick up a penny because a penny lacks sufficient value, but is stealing to pick up an engagement ring — monetary value plus emotional value plus realistic means to track down its rightful owner — then where’s the line between the two? Where does the moral imperative to leave something in place or find the true owner kick in?

The sidewalk dollar you leave behind, out of moral rectitude, for its original owner to claim likely will find the pocket of the next pedestrian in line.

But it could also be worth $1 to you to know you did the right thing in not pocketing it.

In the interest in not running with this all day, I’ll say I can see the value in the absolute — because if everyone acted that way, then all our lost property of all sizes would be there waiting for us when we came back for it. But I will also argue that one can be a good person and still not be absolute. Some accidental bonuses are small enough and unclaimable enough to collect without anyone getting up in our grills.

Which brings me to the thing I’d rather be talking about: where we choose to give ourselves and others a break.

If my loved one — or befriended one or kid or colleague or worst enemy — bent to pick up a nearly worthless scrap of currency, I can’t even conceive of the circumstances where I’d accuse them of theft. Can you?

Would you do that to him?

So what I really question here is your husband’s intent — whether he’s a let’s-run-athought-experiment kind of guy or whether, for all practical purposes, he is kinder to the unknown onetime owner of a lost dollar than he is to his own wife.

Because if he rides you morally over this, I shudder to think how small something has to be for him not to judge.