Ethics Unit Review Questions
1. In this situation I would tell the cashier I was given too much money. I typically look at my change before leaving the counter and in this case it would be immediately obvious that I had received too much. When I was a teenager I worked in a cash register environment and I know people can lose their jobs over having a short register. It was an honest mistake made by the cashier and I wouldn’t want anyone to lose their job. If I can prevent that from happening, I will gladly speak up and give the money back. In my personal value system, I typically live by the “golden rule”. If the situation was reversed I would want someone to tell me if I had overpaid. I also value my integrity and I would feel guilty if I knew I had received too much money and walked out of the store without saying anything.
2. In this situation I would keep the money. It would be too hard for the cab driver to track down the rightful owner of the $20. Most likely if I turned it in he would just pocket it himself. Not to say that makes it right to keep the money, however, XXXX. In my personal value system I believe in Karma and paying it forward. I would use the $20 to take a co-worker to lunch or do something nice for someone else. I might also use the money to pay my cab fare and give the excess as a tip to the driver. This is one of those grey areas of ethical decisions – keeping the money is probably “not right” if you looked at this as a black and white decision, but it is what I would do in this particular case. In my opinion it’s $20 not someone’s life savings. The text talked about “ethical relativism” - the circumstances of the present moment and I think this is the perfect explanation for how I define my ethical principles for this decision. For me it would depend on the amount of the money found. It’s kind of like winning a scratch off lottery ticket. If this was a purse or wallet, where there was a chance of finding the rightful owner, I would make another
2. In this situation I would keep the money. It would be too hard for the cab driver to track down the rightful owner of the $20. Most likely if I turned it in he would just pocket it himself. Not to say that makes it right to keep the money, however, XXXX. In my personal value system I believe in Karma and paying it forward. I would use the $20 to take a co-worker to lunch or do something nice for someone else. I might also use the money to pay my cab fare and give the excess as a tip to the driver. This is one of those grey areas of ethical decisions – keeping the money is probably “not right” if you looked at this as a black and white decision, but it is what I would do in this particular case. In my opinion it’s $20 not someone’s life savings. The text talked about “ethical relativism” - the circumstances of the present moment and I think this is the perfect explanation for how I define my ethical principles for this decision. For me it would depend on the amount of the money found. It’s kind of like winning a scratch off lottery ticket. If this was a purse or wallet, where there was a chance of finding the rightful owner, I would make another