A Miniature Philosophy of Justice

What’s the best thing you’ve ever found randomly on the street?

When I was eight, a friend and I were walking to school when we found a banknote lying on the ground. In today’s money it would probably be worth about $30. Not exactly a fortune. But when you are eight, $30 is enormous. It is lollies. Lots of lollies.

Almost immediately, though, another part of us kicked in. Do we keep it? Do we tell someone? And if we tell someone, who?

We were discovering ethics in real time, without knowing that was what we were doing. There was no lesson plan, no adult standing beside us, no rulebook for finding money on the footpath. Just two children, a banknote and the uncomfortable sense that wanting something did not necessarily make it ours. In the end, we told the school.

I’m not sure what we imagined they would do. Perhaps we simply thought that adults must know how these things worked. They told us to come back at the end of the week. If nobody had claimed the money, we could have it.

There was something sensible in that. Moral responsibility does not always mean solving the problem yourself. Sometimes it means passing it to someone with greater authority, doing what you reasonably can, and accepting that the rest is no longer yours to control.

At the end of the week, nobody had claimed it. So the money was ours. Which, naturally, created another dilemma. Who should get it? The person who saw it first? The person who picked it up? Was discovery more important than possession? Somewhere on that walk to school, two eight-year-olds had stumbled into a miniature philosophy of justice. We split it.

What fascinates me now is that I have absolutely no memory of what happened next. We may have spent it on lollies. We may have bought something else. I genuinely don’t know.

At the time, the money seemed enormously important. Whatever pleasure it eventually bought has disappeared completely. What remained was the decision.

I can’t remember what happened to the money. I can still remember deciding what to do with it. That probably tells me which part of the story was actually valuable.

Daily writing prompt

What’s the best thing you’ve ever found randomly on the street?

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