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The Test:
Take your average coin purse and stuff it with Kleenex, a comb, a business card and cash. Multiply that by ten and head for the streets, like The Promenade in Santa Monica and Lynbrook Drive in Westwood. Now drop the purse and watch our hidden camera to find out what happens. Can you rely on the kindness of strangers?
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Marlow [host]: Each of these wallets contained a business card and that makes it easy to find the owner, but what if there had been no card? is it then okay to keep the money?
Reverend Kusala: No, it's not because from my perspective, one of the poisons that we deal with is greed. To balance our greed, one of our practices is generosity.
Zavala [host]: What if you're a homeless person and you need the ten dollars and you're not being greedy at all?
Reverend Kusala: It becomes practical. (laughter) that's a very good question. It makes it much harder to practice, but the spiritual attainment will be that much greater.
Marlow: But if there's no card in it, you don't know who it belongs to --
Zavala: -- how can you return it?
Campbell: I'd like to think I would donate it. If I see someone homeless, I would pass the money on. You know, being absolutely honest, knowing what my schedule is, I think it would be -- you know, I just can't see myself going to the police station. So what I would hope I would do would be to give it someone who needs it.
Marlow: Would it make a difference how much money is in the bag?
Josephson: I think it would. In fact, I did a commentary on this. Actually, it got a lot of letters on exactly this because I took the position that there are two factors. One, what is intrinsically valuable there and also whether you think it's especially valuable to the person who lost it? For instance, if it was a child's purse, I'd make a greater effort to try to return it on the theory that it may be emotionally important to that person as well as intrinsically.
My own view is, though, that ethics doesn't require extraordinary efforts if at least there doesn't seem to be extraordinary stakes in the issue. Now the more money that's involved, the more likely the other person is to miss it, to look for it and therefore if you tried to find -- if somebody lost a dollar, for instance, you wouldn't even know how to go about legitimately returning it. If it was a hundred dollars, he would probably be reporting it to someone. So I think it isn't that you have a right to it because it's a lesser amount, but the fact that you're sort of the innocent bystander here and what burden is reasonable? I like the idea of finding the money and giving it away. You know, it makes sense, but I don't think --
Zavala: -- so this all sounds like ethics by degrees. You know, situational depends. It seems like is there no simple right, wrong --
Josephson: -- because you want ethics by mathematics.
Campbell: Well, without a business card, you really can't identify who the owner is, so then am I going to take this ten dollars and spend it on myself or am I going to take ten dollars down to the police station?
Reverend Kusala: Can I give you an example of the Thai Buddhist tradition? In the Thai forest tradition, the monks are in the early Buddhist tradition of Theravada. If they're eating and someone picks up their apple and looks at it and says, "my, this is a beautiful apple" and puts it back, they're not allowed to touch that apple again because their ownership is now in question. The person that touched it owns the apple and that person now has to formally give that apple back to the monk. Of course, the moral of the story is don't touch a monk's food (laughter) or they won't be able to eat. But he doesn't own it any longer, even if it's touched by someone else.
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