Cheating is… unfortunately… relative; it depends on if you’re the cheater or cheatee, and if you’ve been negatively affected by it or not.

As for the bank card case, hmm, that’s an interesting question. I’d probably have had returned it to the bank the next day, mostly because if I made a deposit, it’d have had initially been to my own account and caused much confusion.

I found this out when I once returned a check the bank sent me with a bill for ‘insufficient funds’ — but turns out that the person who bounced the check was the NEXT person after I had deposited my own check. The bank staff quickly looked at that day’s deposits and realized the goof. Still, required me to be present in person to sort it all out quickly.

I have no criticism for the original poster per se; I’m just saying how I might have had handled it. But in the end, he didn’t try to use the card for nefarious purposes and saw to that it got returned. So… not sure I could see a case for criticism.

For me, I’ve already said what I wanted to say about the ethics, right vs. wrong, slippery slope, absolutes, etc.

The bank thing…they’re a pain in the ass, and they’re forever charging fees for this or that and I guess I wouldn’t be so quick to do their job for them. That makes me selfish in one sense…but “wrong”? Hmmm.

Considering how banks happily charge fees for this or that, I would have put it in after hour deposit box or put it under the bank front door or something.

If that was true, then people would leave Roe vs. Wade alone. As you very well know, many people (pro-lifers) still do judge women harshly for having abortions to the point where they will physically prevent women from going to clinics, or bombing abortion clinics, or harassing abortion doctors (in fact, it’s gotten so bad that many medical students now skip learning about abortion procedures in med schools), and so on.

There are still absolutes in this country and elsewhere.

About Anne Frank…her neighbors *didn’t know* that she and her family were in hiding, at first. They were eventually discovered by Germans on a tip given to them by one of the neighbors.

But, you seem to be oblivious to the problems with absolutism. For many centuries, it was absolute that any woman who aborts her baby is guilty and should be punished harshly. Now, that absolutism disappears almost completely in this nation and many other nations. I don’t think that anyone wants to see the absolutism in abortion returned to our society ever again.

This brings up the question whether absolutism in ethics ever exists. The philosophers and ethicists argued over different kinds of ethics for many centuries. Ethics is a mammoth subject. It is so big that one of traditional branches of Western philosophy is called ethics. Some of them thought that the absolutism in ethics is merely an illusion. You may think that you have absolute line now but many years later, you may begin to question it and all of a sudden, the absolute line changes or disappears.

I have no qualms about lying to protect other lives. Say, a man is chasing you down the road at night trying to kill you and you come to my house. (You may say that this is a dumb example and I am exaggerating to make my point. But, that is what ethicists do. They have to think of different possible situations to test their theories about ethics.) I let you in and you hide in one of my closets. Few minutes later, the man knocks on my door and asks me if I see any woman around here. In a heartbeat, I lie to him. I lie to him that I see a person running toward the forest across the road and that person could be what the man is looking for. After making sure that the man is running toward the forest, I call police to arrest the man for trying to kill you. I am not going to sacrifice your life on the Kantian altar of Honesty-At-All-Times!

Some years ago when my two oldest sons were young, probably around 10 to 12 years old or younger, they talked with me about lying because it was one of the topics being discussed at their school. The school taught that it is wrong to lie. Near the end of discussion, I told them that as they grow up, they would realize that they might need to lie sometimes, in contrary to what was being taught in school. I used as an example Anne Frank that was discussed at school previously. I explained that Anne Frank was able to hide in the apartment for a long time because people in the town were lying to the police.

Lying, however, can be easily misused for one’s own gains. For some ethicists, drawing an absolute line is not the answer to the problem of misuse but education is the best key for knowing when to lie and when not to lie. For other ethicists, absolutism is the absolute answer to the problem.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
josephpietrojeungriolo@gmail.com

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain.