Mundane Ethical Dilemma

3.7.11 Early Afternoon

This morning when you went for a jog after your early class you notice a $20 bill lying in the gutter of a suburban homes driveway – there’s a newish van parked nearby. You look around. You pick it up. It’s wet from the water in the gutter so you wipe it off inside the pocket of your running shorts. There’s the thought that goes: ring the doorbell and ask if someone had dropped it. But you’re dull and jumbled. You stick it in your pocket, look around again and continue on your way.

While you jog you encounter a few thought-movements related to the banal moral dilemma. Could this be an experiment? – stick a twenty in the gutter and watch what happens from behind a fence? No, highly doubtful.

You are brought to an insight you had some few months ago while emailing Tom. Amongst the emotional resistance and arguments of the thought-movements you recall that ethical thinking comes about primarily when faced directly with a dilemma; it comes about secondly after the dilemmas themselves occur, when one begins to wonder if what one had done was ‘right’; and thirdly, ethical thinking springs up from the encounter and identification with stories, but at much weaker strength.

Your emotional movements stimulate the ethical dimension of the ‘lost’ bill. It goes: perhaps someone dropped it and will ‘need’ it. Or, you have not earned the money, and you also do not ‘need’ it. And, it will be growth-centered if you ring the doorbell.

You jog along listening to music and reacting to the narrative in your mind about what to do. You think about what you could do with the money. A haircut? You felt unattractive this morning and could use the twenty to get a haricut – smooth things out. And, as if to add support to this trajectory, you remember one time when you were younger that you’d lost the same amount of money while riding your bike – a lot of money to you then. This is reasonable, it says.

There’s a counter argument, though. It goes: you do not ‘need’ it, and it is not yours. There’s a recalling of what the ‘commissaris’ says in one of Janwillem van de Wetering’s Amsterdam detective mysteries – “I have not seen much of the Law, but what I have seen has effected me.” You think that returning it may be good. For instance, it would clarify some of your jumbledness this morning. Is this sufficient though? A negative aspect of yourself says it isn’t, that there’s a sort of childish stupidity about it. Yet it is not so. You are not doing it so as to be a ‘good boy’ or merely to feel better about yourself and the world. You feel that a voluntary action aimed at returning the money would help the ‘world’; that is, the quality of the movement would be noticed – perhaps not initially, but later – by the lost money’s owner, and that they would then be in a position to contact this ‘quality’ themselves in their further movements. Perhaps not use it just yet or ever, but they would feel it.

You think that the thinking is not necessary – all of those thought movements are confusing. At the moment of noticing the bill, the feeling was the guided argument. But then the thought came in and you reasoned about not feeling particularly up to ringing the bell because there was an anxiety about dealing with people. Perhaps the early feeling was the higher emotional center, the ‘thinking’ was mechanical.

And so you flip back and forth. There are some times your swayed by both impulses. Yet you finally side with the ‘qualitativenss’. You walk up the steps after jogging back to the house with the van. You ring the doorbell and wait. You ring it again and wait. You wonder if you might just put it under the doormat. The door opens up, suddenly. A girl about your age, attractive in a fleshy sort of way, blonde, but not uninteresting and dull. She’s sleepy looking, dressed in shorts and a baggy white shirt.

You tell here the story, leaving out that you jogged about with the money in you pocket before returning it. She opens the door the whole way and you hand it to her. You don’t ask it if it’s hers. You feel sweaty. She say’s: you’re nice to do that, have a nice night- I mean day.

Well, there we are.