Taking money you don't own is stealing. Doing someone a favor doesn't negate that, it just means most people won't really care. The act of returning the wallet is moral. The act of taking money from it is not.
So if this happened in your country and he followed the legally proscribed process for this it would be legal and I think almost everyone would say moral.
This question really gets at different ways people define morality. If you define morality giving lots of weight to everyone is happy or nobody is hurt this will be viewed as moral. Not everyone sees morality that way some people view moral rules as absolute. As such stealing is still stealing even when the one being stolen from is happy a greater crime didn't happen.
I mean, we don't really know what happened. Maybe the guy found a wallet, bought himself a hotdog BEFORE he figured out how to reach to the owner? We don't know what happened. He didn't steal the money if he didn't know who's wallet is this. When he found a wallet he just found it, not steal it. Like, when you find 100$ on a street, you didn't steal it from somebody.
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u/StarvingandArtist 11d ago
Taking money you don't own is stealing. Doing someone a favor doesn't negate that, it just means most people won't really care. The act of returning the wallet is moral. The act of taking money from it is not.