Honesty challenged when poor person confronted with opportunity from another's misfortune

In 'Lost and Found', the free on-line flash fiction story by Rob Hopcott, we see an honesty dilemma faced by a poor person when confronted with the possibility of benefiting from someone elses loss.

Whether Smiley Johnson, the fictional character in the very short story, takes advantage of his good fortune or not, I will leave to your reading of the story, however the dilemma is an interesting one.

I have often heard it said by charity collectors that the poorest people are the most generous and wealthy people are the least generous. Why is this? Could it be that people are poor because they do not have the ruthlessness to be selfish enough to acquire substantial amounts of money? Is the state of poverty self defining and the state of wealth self determining?

In these days when the Credit Crunch is in the news almost every day, one of the best industries in which to be clearly is debt. Talking personally, the thought of benefiting from someone's financial difficulties and exploiting them when they are at their most vulnerable is completely unacceptable, however profitable.

In my experience, there are some very good people in the world and also some very bad people with all the rest of the people somewhere in the middle, irrespective of ethical beliefs or creed. Whether this is genetic or the product of different people's upbringing, I leave to the scientists. I sometimes suspect that, if deistic belief systems were less prevalent in the world today, we would make more progress in understanding how to motivate people's behaviour to the benefit of all the community and therefore also themselves.

What you think?

Your comments below are welcomed :-)

Bye for now

Rob
(Rob Hopcott - free online author)