You’re standing in line somewhere, waiting to pay for items in a store. Perhaps you just finished a meal in a restaurant and now you’re making your way to the cashier.Suddenly, you see a dollar bill slowly falling toward the floor after the person in front of you has dropped it.  It is obvious that he or she is unaware that this has just happened. So there it lies before you. A whole dollar. One hundred pennies. What would you do?

Well, you have two choices:

If you are of the self-serving greedy persuasion and hold no compassion for your fellow human being, you bend over while pretending to scratch your ankle and sweep the dollar up into your hand. You shove it into your pocket as quickly as you can, hoping that nobody noticed your actions. You just made yoursel a dollar richer. Never mind that it was at the expense of someone else’s misfortune!

Conversely, if you consider values such as honesty and empathy for others to be important, you will politely let the person know that he or she has just dropped that dollar as you hand it back.

By choosing the second option, that person will be grateful and likely thank you. If for some reason this doesn’t happen and they simply snatch that dollar from your hand, you have still done the right thing. You have resisted the temptation to take something that is not rightfully yours. You have chosen not to steal. One does not need to possess strong religious convictions or even have a particularly rigid set of morals to realize that the act of theft on any level is fundamentally wrong.

Whether such a hypothetical person inadvertently dropped a nickel, a penny, or a $100 bill, we must assume that he or she has either earned that money or it has been given to them by a family member for the purpose of purchasing goods. One lonely dollar may not be worth very much or even be missed, but it still has value. How much one relies on cash is irrelevant. It belongs to them.

If the tables were turned, and it was you who dropped a dollar onto the floor or ground, wouldn’t you appreciate it if someone retrieved it and returned it to you, even if such a mishap would have gone unnoticed?

The answer to such a question should be obvious.