New Zealand couple flee with £4m: what would Robin Hood do?

So what would you do? The bank accidentally puts £4m in your bank account. Do you take the money and run, or do you brave the call centre and tell them what's happened?

People ask questions like this every time a bank makes a mistake and someone tries to cash in on it, which seems to happen remarkably often. The New Zealanders follow in the footsteps of a couple in Essex who were convicted last month for taking £61,000 from cashpoints after realising the withdrawals weren't registering on their account.

People say such cases create "moral dilemmas", but there are none. Taking the money is just wrong. You know it's not yours and you could easily not take it. The only dilemma is whether to do the right thing or give in to temptation. Of course, it's not difficult to invent spurious justifications. Some say the bank made the mistake so it should pay the price. That's like stealing a car and saying it's the fault of the owner for leaving the keys in. Others perversely descend into the ditch of self-serving mendacity and pretend they're occupying the moral high ground. The banks are thieving, lying bastards who have spent all our money, they cry, so it's only fair that we steal it back. WWRHD? (What would Robin Hood do?) Put it like that and it almost seems as if theft is your duty.

So we forget all the times we've said "two wrongs don't make a right". We forget that principled civil disobedience is carried out in public, not as secretly as possible. We forget that the answer to WWRHD? is that he'd give it away to the poor, not go on a spending binge. Most of all, we forget how quick we were to condemn politicians for milking their expenses, albeit legally, just because they could.

There is no moral complexity here, only a simple truth of human nature: that something that seems very wrong can quickly and easily seem very right, if it suits us.

Julian Baggini is editor of The ­Philosophers' Magazine

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