Ethics Newsline®

LONDON

You’re walking along the beach, and you find a toilet kit washed ashore. It contains some sodden cosmetics and a few dollars in change, but no identification. What should you do? The ordinarily ethical person probably tosses the potions and keeps the cash, persuaded by three arguments: Whatever drifts ashore falls under the heading of “finders, keepers,” whatever has no identification is difficult to return, and whatever has trivial value would cost more to advertise for the proper owner than it’s worth.

The next day on the same beach you find a dinghy with a small outboard motor attached, but no name or registration number. What should you do? While the finders-keepers and anonymity tests still hold, the triviality test does not: The dinghy clearly has significant value. The ordinarily ethical person probably, at the very least, contacts nearby harbormasters to see if anyone is missing a boat, leaving a phone number in case the owner calls.

The third day, astonishingly, you find forty shipping containers that have washed off the deck of a vessel grounded on a sand bar in plain view a mile offshore. One contains a dozen brand-new BMW motorcycles, each worth more than $20,000. What should you do?

This third case is not hypothetical. The ship was the Napoli, a 62,000-ton cargo ship. On January 19, she encountered a terrific storm and was abandoned by her crew off the coast of Devon, England. As she was being towed to a nearby port, she began to list and was deliberately grounded. When the containers came loose, scores of people came from miles around, swarmed across Branscombe Beach under the eyes of helpless police, opened the containers, and made off with everything of value, including the motorcycles.

Why? They apparently saw this opportunity as somewhere between winning a lottery and finding money in a hollow tree. “It’s great, isn’t it?” one man told the Guardian newspaper, “a cross between a bomb site and a car boot [trunk] sale.” Another said it was like finding “Aladdin’s cave.” In their view, the stuff was there for the taking, and they were in the right place at the right time.

To call these people “looters” gives the wrong impression. These weren’t professional second-story men, cat burglars, or back-alley thugs. By all accounts (and there were many in the news here last week), they were ordinary people. Two questions, then: Were their actions legal, and were they ethical?

What they did clearly fails the triviality test. As for anonymity, there’s no doubt about the source of their loot, and no difficulty tracing its ownership. The finders-keepers test, however, is more complex. In fact, the police were legitimately flummoxed. English law allows salvagers to take whatever marine wreckage they find, as long as they fill out a form and take it to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency within 28 days. That entitles them to a reward if the property is claimed — and to legal ownership if, after a year, it is not. So the police felt they could do little more than hand out forms. By day’s end, some of the items began showing up for sale on eBay, brazenly described as coming from the Napoli, suggesting that even the pretense of legality had been breached by some of these collectors.

What’s being tested here, then, is not simply the law but the ethics underlying the law. Given the circumstances, would we expect a reasonably ethical person to remove objects clearly belonging to someone else, or would we want them to help restore lost property to its owners? Surely the latter. Cynics, of course, will yawp that if you don’t take it, others will — a line of reasoning so thin that it also would permit you to slaughter your obnoxious neighbor if you thought others were also upset with him. Cynics also will argue that the shipper’s insurance will recompense the owner for anything removed — an argument that, along with driving up insurance costs for everyone else, fails to account for one woman’s loss of a collection of letters and pictures, personal and irreplaceable, that disappeared from Branscombe Beach as she was moving her home to South Africa.

So suppose we grant that, except for those who fenced their wares on eBay, the rest intended to behave legally by filing proper forms. Even so, does that make them ethical?

While visiting schools in England and Scotland last week, I tested that question with two head teachers whose schools have rigorous programs in character education. Suppose, I asked them, the face of one of your teachers showed up on television reports from Branscombe Beach, and there they were, taking stuff. Would you say, “Oh, whatever teachers do in their private lives is their own business”? Or would you confront that teacher?

Here, too, law and ethics diverged. Legally, each head teacher recognized that it would be difficult to raise a formal complaint. But ethically, each agreed that they would have to raise the issue with the teacher. Their questions: What did you think you were doing? What message do you want your students to take away from this? Is this the way you want the world to behave?

The lesson? Very simply, it’s that ethics rises above law. When the two are seen as one — when people can convince themselves that if it’s not illegal, it must be ethical — even a generally law-abiding culture occasionally will run into sorry tales of collective rapacity from places like Branscombe Beach. What ordinarily ethical people want, I suspect, is not a culture of every beachcomber for himself, but of school heads who, despite the law, are willing to hold those beachcombers to a higher ethical standard. They want a culture where, when ethics and law diverge, ethics wins.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics