Baldo by Hector D. Cantú and Carlos Castellanos for November 08, 2014

Decisiones, decisiones. Ellas siempre son un problema.

Maybe it is both. But you must play it right.

Hard to imagine a wallet with cash and no id

A number of years ago, I found a $20 bill lying in the street. My first thought was, “Do I look for who lost it?” Then I realized, IT’S MINE!

I won’t talk about the time I found a small bag of high-grade marijuana in the parking lot of a company I was working for at the time.

Only if you were praying for temptation.

Tia Carmen has never struck me as the type of person who would NOT take a lost wallet right to the church office and turn it in.

I go with temptation.

I have said it before and I will probably say it again: You gotta love Tia Carmen.

I’m with Gokie5 on that one.

I once found a $20, and then another, and looking up and down the street ended up finding a wallet and nearly $500 blowing around in the wind. It was in front of a school, so I took it into the office there and said someone was having a really bad day out there. Turns out it belonged to a kid’s nanny and she’d just been paid, and she came sobbing into the office after I left, sure it was gone forever; she couldn’t believe someone had actually turned it in. Given that her car had recently been stolen, having someone be honest instead when it felt like life had given her a one-two punch… Man, that felt good. She never did find out who turned the money in.

I found several hundred bucks once in the building where I worked. It was tempting, but I knew only a couple of strangers had come through that area just before I saw the bills on the floor. They were able to tell me exactly how much they lost and in what bills, so I gave it back to them. Darn, but a man’s gotta be able to sleep at night.

When I was a kid my family went to the nearby beach for the day (the only place we could afford to go since my father was unemployed at the time). I think my sister was the first one to find the cash, a five dollar bill fluttering in some brush next to the path we were on, soon we were finding more and more money caught in the brush. I don’t remember how much we found but there was no way to find out who the money belonged to, and with our money situatin at the time it probably was an answer to prayer.

Once found a 50 pesos bill in front of a curch when a child. That should have been equal to 20 dollars at the time. Church was closed and no one at sight, so I kept it.

If there is ABSOLUTELY no identifying information in the wallet, go for answer to prayer. If the guy’s driver’s license, visa, family photo etc. is inside,then it is a temptation you must resist Tia. Think how it would feel if it was your money?

The correct answer is, “neither,” as the context in which such a question would make sense is purely imaginary.As for what to do, one can use either the golden rule, or Kant’s categorical imperative, or the idea of social interactions as an iterated prisoner’s dilemma amongst a group of social apes to conclude that the right thing to do is to return the wallet. No invisible sky fairy needed!