CNN is reporting the story of a man who bought two small boxes at a garage sale ten years ago and just discovered that they contained 65 previously undiscovered glass negatives by famed nature photographer Ansel Adams. He purchased the boxes for $45 (haggled down from $75), and their contents are now assessed to be worth at least $200 million.
Such stories raise interesting ethical questions. For example, if you were the lucky stiff who bought the boxes, would you give any part of it to the original owner? I think the fair, kind and ethical thing to do would be to voluntarily give the original owner $1 million of the the $200 million, though no legal obligation says that owe him anything. (The least you could do would be to give him the $30 you talked him out of!) But what would you do with these variations on the facts?
1.If you realized immediately at the garage sale that the plates were invaluable before you bought them, would you tell the owner he was making a mistake and why?
2. If you were the owner and a potential purchaser did tell you the true value of the plates, should you share some of the resulting profit with him?
3. If you knew that the owner wouldn’t share the resulting profits, would it make you less likely to inform him of his mistake?
4.If you didn’t tell the owner the true value, and he asked you, “Why do you want to purchase this junk, anyway?,” how would you answer?
5. Finally, if you knew how valuable the plates were and decided not to tell him, would you still try to talk him into reducing his price from $75 to $45?
[My answers: 1-Yes; 2-Yes; 3-It shouldn’t make any difference. 4-“I think it’s a good deal.” 5-Are you kidding?]
I think #4 is the toughest question, don’t you?
Ethics Alarms 
But jack these were bought over twenty years ago. If he knows where the orginal owners are I would be surprised.
Yeah, I know—I’d try to find him though.
Good item, Jack. Case in point: Here where I work as development director, we run an annual low-six-figure charity auction, the profits from which are essential to the church’s finances. The generous folks who donate items for auction are usually, but not always, members of our church (but that is/should be immaterial). This year, a lovely lady donated three unframed watercolors. My colleague and I liked them immediately and thought it would be good for our catalog to have a bit more information about them than the lady could provide — she merely valued them collectively at $50. The signature was a somewhat unusual last name. After some digging, we came to the conclusion that the watercolors could well be worth several thousand dollars, although we did not go to an appraiser. We did, however, call the lady, we told her what we thought might be true, and we asked her if she would like to have the items back, knowing what we suspected. She was fairly nonplussed and said that she hoped we would be able to make a lot of money from auctioning them. I’m not entirely sure if this was the right way to do this, because we had never run across this circumstance before! In this case, she might have felt ashamed to take them back, and I regret it if she did. We just wanted to be fair about it. Bottom line: Taking unfair advantage of someone’s misfortune or mistake is always wrong.
I would also be surprised if he knew which garage sale he bought them at, let alone the owner. Some people stop by 20 sales in one weekend every weekend every summer.
I can’t answer the questions straight up because they omit too many facts or circumstances. I’ll justify my “ethics train wreck” if you like, but my answers after some contemplation are:
1 – No. 2 – Yes. 3 – Immaterial. 4 – “I like the box it comes in.” 5 – Probably not. Unless I only had $45 and no other way of securing a final transaction.
“I LIKE THE BOX IT COMES IN”????
You did see the earlier post on “deceit,” right?
But what if you DID like the box?
To be deceit, you MUST like the box; you’re just evading the real answer, which is that you also like the 200 mil. worth of negatives. If you didn’t like the box, it would jsut be a lie.
Good quiz. I answered 1-3 and 5 same as you. #4 was the toughest. I think I would have said, “I think they may be worth a lot more.”
Not “I like the box”?
I may get a higher mark for ethics than I get for bargaining.