Would it matter if the amount were, say, $500, or if it were on the floor of a casino? In a very small town instead of a big city? In your workplace? Would your own financial state at the time factor into whether or not to keep the cash? What about your mood?
The closer you look at that lost money on the sidewalk -- and at your own reactions -- the more the philosophical questions and moral dilemmas proliferate. What, then, is the right thing to do with found money that has no identification attached?
The law's answer is clear: California Penal Code Section 485 stipulates that if you find money you need to make "reasonable and just efforts to find the owner." Otherwise, you're "guilty of theft."
"If you find even a quarter, you're technically obligated to turn it in," says Sgt. Michael Andraychak of the San Francisco Police Department.
He acknowledges that no one at the department recalls any "significant amount" of cash being turned in, but that the property division has received found money in amounts ranging "from $1 to $200 or so."
Really, $1?
Yes, says Andraychak, who recalls being approached once when he was working in the Tenderloin by a citizen who turned in a $1 bill.
"If the finder is willing to stay and talk to the officer and fill out a report, we book it," he explains, adding that if no one's claimed the cash after 120 days, the finder is entitled to get the money back.
And what about those "reasonable efforts" the law says you need to make to find the money's owner?
"You'll sometimes see folks putting an ad in the newspaper," Andraychak says, which legally satisfies the reasonable-effort clause.
When Rob <snip>erham, 42, a Web editor for Medi-Cal in Sacramento, happened upon $60 in a SaveMart parking lot about three years ago, his first thought was, "Hey, this is fantastic."
Then he remembers thinking, "It's tragic losing money. And it's also extremely satisfying to give money back to people."
<snip>erham decided to leave his phone number with the supermarket manager in case anyone inquired about the lost cash. He also posted an ad on Craigslist asking respondents to identify particulars (the exact amount and location, or the fact that the money was folded into a wad), so that he could return it to its rightful owner.
Three people replied. None provided particulars. In other words, they were lying.
"It's a little dance that happens between you and someone who's interested in taking the money," he says. "They try to describe the money in a way that will not be ruled out by what you know."
After none of the responders to his Craigslist post were able to identify the cash, <snip>erham ended up keeping it. He spent the found money at Chipotle and on helium balloons. "I remember because I earmarked it for non-essentials," he says.
Unlike <snip>erham, Leigh Young of Grand Rapids, Mich. reunited an owner with her lost cash -- some $400 that Young found when she was in high school.
This happened in the 1970s, but she clearly remembers the exhilaration she felt after picking the money up off the sidewalk.
"I was on pins and needles as I placed the [lost and found] ad in the newspaper" she says.
She decided to wait a month before claiming the cash as her own. In the meantime, though, she overheard someone at school telling a friend how her mother had lost her entire paycheck and couldn't buy groceries.
"I begrudgingly let the other student know that the money had been found and it was safe," Young says.
She had mixed feelings when she found the actual owner, "knowing most families really couldn't afford a loss like that, but that my family could have used the cash, too."
Still, "I was glad to see them so joyous when they had the money back in hand," she says. "I remember seeing them cry as they recouped the funds -- and the look on their faces, the relaxing of their shoulders."
A few hundred bucks may compel one to seek out the owner of lost money, but what about not reporting a few dollars of errant cash? It's "theft" by the letter of the California law, but is it really the moral equivalent of stealing?
Christi Foist, 32, who works in downtown San Francisco, has found money several times on her bike commute along the Embarcadero. She also recently found $10 in a meeting room at work, which a co-worker reclaimed after Foist sent out a group e-mail.
When it comes to the cash she's found on the street (the largest amount was $21), Foist reasons, "There's really no possible way of returning it to the owner, and it's too small an amount to matter."
"It's weird whenever you have something that's good fortune," she says, "but you know that it's happened at someone else's expense."
To resolve this dilemma, Foist once treated a friend to a cup of hot chocolate with money that she had found. "I'm a person of faith," she says. "And I believe that when grace has been extended to you, you share that with others."
James Cummings, 57, a freelance accountant who lives in San Francisco's Russian Hill neighborhood, has been sharing the money he finds on the street during his morning jogs for the past 20 years.
"I had slipped during a run, so I was looking where I was placing my feet, and I saw four or five pennies," he says. "I don't know why I picked them up, but I did. Only a couple days later, entirely coincidentally, I got a solicitation from UNICEF. It talked about medicine for bringing a child back from diarrheal sickness, and the tablet that they give the child cost three cents."
A light bulb went on: He decided to donate his found money to charity. "I had a pint-sized, old-time milk jar, and I just started throwing the money that I found on my morning run into the jar," he says.
As soon as the bottle fills up, Cummings tallies it and sends donations to his favorite charities, which include the San Francisco Food Bank.
His annual donations have ranged from $27 to $123. "It's the kind of thing I do because I can," he says. "I make a good living, and I don't need to augment my earnings this way."
But he says his mother is "aghast" at her son's practice.
"She's Italian," he laughs. "She thinks that if it comes your way, it's supposed to. She thinks it's God saying, 'Hey you idiot, pay attention. Here's your $20!'"
If you don't subscribe to such a philosophy of predestination, though, the moral dimensions of the found, unidentified money dilemma seem to boil down to the dollar amount.
Few would argue that, despite the letter of the law, keeping a found quarter without searching for its rightful owner is ethically dubious. But what about $10 dollars, or $1,000?
<snip>erham says anything greater than $5 would be worth seeking out the owner, while Foist says she'd think about contacting the police office if she found $100 or more.
Cummings says that for big sums or valuable lost objects he'd wait and look around the neighborhood for "lost" signs before channeling them to good causes.
But once you make theamountpart of your decision to seek out an owner, does the whole moral house of cards start to fall? Why would it be OK to keep quiet about $25 you found on the street, but make an effort to track down the owner of $2,500? Conceivably, that $25 could be much more significant to its owner than the larger amount.
One answer is that it's just too much of a hassle to bother looking for the owner of a small sum, especially since the chances of finding the person are so slim.
But our decisions about found money also bring up a deeper issue about moral character and what it means to do the right thing. Some philosophers describe the problem in terms of "virtue ethics" (thinking of people in terms of broad characteristics like "honest," "hardworking," "kind," etc.) versus "situationists," who emphasize how contextual forces in a given moment override broad moral traits.
For example, a 1972 study found that subjects who discovered a dime that experimenters had planted in a phone booth were 22 times more likely to help a woman (also planted by the experimenters) who "dropped" her papers nearby. In other words, the brief emotional high that followed finding the free dime affected the subjects' moral behavior (compassion) in the moment.
"Situational virtue" could mean that your decision about what to with the $20 dollar bill you find on the street might spring from whatever's going on in the moment rather than whether you're an "honest" person.
Take, for example, the New York Times' reporter's husband, who decided to keep a $100 bill he found in a doctor's office after considering it in light of the sums of money he'd been paying his doctor in recent visits.
In other words, found money can become the perfect missing piece to whatever moral puzzle you've constructed in your own mind.
So what's the right thing to do, readers, and when does discovering lost cash turn into a metaphysical quandary instead of a stroke of good luck?
What's the most money you've ever found, what did you do with it, and why?
