A few days ago I was in a London taxicab when I noticed a possibly expensive purse in the seat next to me. I climbed out of the cab and without much thought (shame on me) gave it to the driver. I explained someone had left it there. Of course I was intent on treating the driver like a decent human being. But wait, I know I am honest and maybe he isn’t. But wait, maybe I couldn’t have gotten the purse to the woman very easily. But wait, I could have posted notice on this blog and had you help me track her down. But wait, isn’t it my obligation to simply leave the woman no worse off than she was in the first place? But wait, what is the default point for defining "in the first place"? But wait, what would the driver have thought if he saw me taking the purse out of his cab? But wait, isn’t a purse really really important? But wait, what if the purse belonged to the driver?
Assuming that both you and the driver are decent people, giving the purse to the driver means that the owner is more likely to get it back because (a) the cost of trying to hunt the owner down is probably the same whether it’s you or the taxi company doing it; (b) in an attempt to maximise their future business by increasing good will, the taxi company has more incentive to actively look for the owner than you [*]; and (c) the owner is more likely to contact the taxi company than random strangers on the off chance that they hopped into the taxi after her.
If you don’t trust the driver, then you should have kept the purse and attempted to find the owner yourself. But you have no particular reason not to trust them, so you took the cultural norm of trusting them.
[*] Well, they would if black cabs in London were visibly and verifiably from different taxi companies and there was competition between them.
If it was a black cab, the bag most likely made it back.
I think it is perfectly permissable to feel morally at ease having handed the driver the purse. There are many variables you were incapable of knowing without conducting a thorough investigation, and to carrty out such an investigation would supererogatory to say the least. After all, ethical decisions are always contextual. Handing the purse to the driver is, to me, plainly the right thing to do given that you had no other (straightforward and immediately obvious) way of tracking down the owner. I don’t think this is a particularly taxing moral conundrum.
This is a practical problem, not an ethical one:
1) Acquire any identifying information about the purse: Color, brand, style, possibly the name and address of the owner if it is obvious on a document inside the purse. Also get the drivers identifying information (name, license number, etc.)
2) Give the purse to the driver. If the owner of the purse attempts to track it down, she (or he) may be able to locate it.
3) Tell the driver that you will try to locate the owner of the purse by calling the owner, placing an advertisement in the Times, etc.
4) Carry through on your promise in #3.
Probably the driver won’t steal the contents of the purse knowing that you will be trying to locate the owner. There’s a chance he’ll try to steal the money and blame it on you, but then he may besmirch his reputation with his employer as an honest driver.
Here’s my question: what would you have done if instead of a purse, it was a loose $20 bill? What about $100? A money clip of $10,000?
Wow, it’s crazy how many people have such exact answers to such a complicated and debatable question.
Give the driver your phone number, should the owner call the company, and take the purse and try to call the owner or get info from the phone number and leave the purse with the driver and try to call the owner.
Yes there was, crime & punishment – I thought of the same sting operations when I read this post.
I probably would have looked in the purse for a driver’s license and called them up to have them come pick it up from me. I’d probably take it with me back to my house or office though before I did, because I’d feel odd looking through a purse in public in case someone though I was rummaging through and stealing something. A little irrational, maybe…
That said, giving it to the driver’s a fine impulse. It’s his cab, after all.
Shouldn’t you have taken the purse to the nationalized Lost and Found Business? This sounds like a societal problem that the scalability of the government is necessary to reduce costs, providing value to society.
Open the purse, find id. Copy ID information with cab information. Leave with cabbie and tell him you are going to call the woman and tel her the cabbie has her purse.
I agree with the course open purse, copy information, and tell driver you’ll contact the owner to tell them who has the purse. You’ve covered your ethical obligation to secure the return of the property and increased the trustworthiness of the driver to the point that you can be assured of its relative safety.
At least, it’ll be safe until the owner leaves it in the cab again. Perhaps you should just hold on to it for the owner, as they’ve proven themselves less trustworthy than either yourself or the cab driver.
As my mum always told me, “the policeman is your friend.” The purse no doubt had ID in it, if you were too busy and didn’t trust the driver you could have turned it over to the police who are pretty good at tracking people down. The same goes (even more so) for a wad of cash.
speaking as a former cab driver:
the comments of several to get ID info, give purse to driver, get cab number and driver name, and let driver know you will attempt to contact owner to let owner know you gave purse to driver is very good.
Also, this illustrates one of the reasons why you should always write down the cab number and driver name when you take a cab. In some places, like NYC, you are automtaically given a receipt with such info.
And cash, drugs, etc. are different. See e.g, Blank Top Chronicles:
http://blanktop.blogspot.com/2007/08/me-blank-top-your-phone-number-please.html
edit: “you’d end up spending all of your [time] dithering”
I have no idea of what to do with the purse, but I love the assumption that you are responsible for it. I’m exactly like that – basically everything bad that ever happens to anyone is somehow my fault.
Still working on that problem.
I like Emo Phillips’ answer: Take the purse, because, if I were that woman, I would want to be taught a lesson not to leave valuable things in taxicabs. It’s the only ethical thing to do.
I have actually been involved on both sides of this problem. Once, when I was in graduate student in Chicago, I found a wallet on a seat of the train I took to school in the morning. I could have turned to wallet over to the train employee in the adjacent car, and it likely would have found it’s way back to its owner, but I was certain that I could return the item using the identification that was inside. I chose to return the item myself.
About six years ago, I left my wallet on a table at a Boston Billiards. I didn’t notice the loss until later that night when I returned home, and I was about to drive back to see if I could find it when the phone rang and a lady told me she and her date had found my wallet. They held it until I returned to pick it up.
All in all, I think you should try to return the item yourself as long as you are certain that you can do so.
why did you feel that it was important to point out that the purse looked expensive?
because it was more likely to contain valuables?
Because the person losing the purse was likely to suffer more?
If the purse had not looked expensive would you have been as concerned/
What if the purse had been cheap, but it contained a weeks income for the person who lost it while the owner of an expensive purse would have hardly noticed the loss of the cash in the purse?
Calm down, spencer. It’s because whoever the owner, the cabbie is more likely to filch an expensive one. Definitely nonlinear there, because there’s no expectation that he might charge a rich rider $30 and a poor rider $3 for he return trip.
Take note of name, phone number. Alert cabbie. Done.
I don’ think we can just say summarily that ‘ethics is still just a matter of utility’, nor can we say ‘this is why utilitarianism is a poor moral guide’. No moral theory is complete.
Ethics can’t just be about utility, because appealing to a moral majority has some nasty little consequences. If we all vote to slice up infopractical into 10 equally sized pieces simply because it pleased us to, would infopractical not object? Does infopractical’s right to bodily integrity not trump the satisfaction the rest of us would get from seeing infopractical fragmented? Read Kant for more on duty and rights, and why deontology is a sensible and necessary response to utilitarianism.
However, utilitarianism is not a poor moral guide. It is a very effective and efficient one, albeit an incomplete one. I’d even go so far as to say that a utilitarian logic informs much of our moral thought and action, whether or not we are aware that we conduct such calculus. It’s founding premise is almost irrefutable – crudely, the less harm the better, the more pleasure the better (of course, one would need to define utility, but that is another discussion). I say almost for reasons noted in the above paragraph. But that utilitarianism gets us most of the way toward a moral solution is a strength. The remaining distance it cannot cover is a weakness of the theory, but only a weakness because no theory can, on its own, provide a comprehensive and total solution to every moral problem that arises, whether of a quotidian, political, or otherwise.
For all of these reasons I suspect that our moral guide is something that combines most ethical thoeries (utilitarianism, deontology, social contract, ethics of care). These are no small issues, as far removed as they may seem from a seemingly innocuous incident in a cab. That an incident in a cab raises these larger issues and questions is perhaps indicative of the fact that morality generally is no simple exercise.
Franklin is spot on. Stopping to conduct a utilitarian equation every time we confront a moral predicament is impractical. And of course rule utlitiarianism is at risk of not being utilitarianism at all since it prioritises rules over utility. Nevertheless, I don’t think to say that we stop to perform moral balance sheets in our head everytime we make a moral decision/act is a fair way of representing how utilitarian thinking is present in matters of morality. As I say earlier, we may not be expressly aware that we do utilitarian calculations even though I suspect that this is frequently what we in fact do. Of course, what we do and what we ought to do are not necessarily equivalent. That we should do more good than harm, and that this should apply to as many people as possible, is a hard premise to reject. Granted, it is not perfect, but I have a feeling that this, one, is often how we do morality, and two, often leads to favourable results morally speaking.
The strength of deontology is that it emphasises duty regardless of consequence. Indeed, Kant held this position so firmly he was forced to adopt some controversial conclusions, for example, that lying is always wrong, QED. We can all think of instances where lying is morally permissable (think of the crazed axe murderer). Of course, this is the sort of extreme case Franklin points to and at which point other moral theories break down. That said, I don’t think we need to understand utilitarianism as requiring detailed analysis for every common moral decision. Frequently, utilitarian outcomes for common moral decisions are clear and intuitively available. Sometimes they aren’t.
My point: Utilitarianism is a profoundly useful way of living a moral life, and regularly an easy one. There will be occassions where it is prohibitively cumbersome to do a full analysis, but then other moral theories are not without difficulties of their own. I just feel it is unfair to say that utilitariansim is a poor moral guide when often the opposite is the case. As for preferring other moral approaches over utilitarianism, I also agree, since I don’t subscribe to one and only one moral theory. Regularly deontological approaches are preferrable. But regularly utilitarian ones are too.
Is this conudrum an “English” issue or a global issue? Would this line of questioning be applied in say Japan?
I will eventually learn to proofread when posting at 3 a.m.:
“It’s when the other approaches break down that I’m
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