^^^^AUTOMOD The following is a copy of the above post. This comment is a record of the above post as it was originally written, in case the post is deleted or edited. Read this before contacting the mod team
My SO and I were walking our pup when we noticed something shiny in the grass. It was a small bracelet with three rows of rhinestones--it looked a lot like this. Some rhinestones were missing, the elastic was broken in a few places, and the metal was detached in two places and was kind of sharp. The metal was also discolored. My SO wanted to leave it for the owner to come back to find it. I wanted to discard it because it was broken and I felt certain it was not of significant value. We ended up flipping a coin (best out of three). I won, so we discarded it, but my SO was not happy about it.
In case it matters, (1) there wasn't really a reasonable place to "turn it in" where we found it, and (2) we don't go walking in that direction very often, so it was unlikely we'd be likely to return later to the spot to see if it was still there; if it had been closer by, we probably would have just compromised and agreed to leave it for a specified time and come back.
My perspective: It was a very cheap piece, and since it was so beat up, I doubted the owner would be missing it or even would have looked for it, especially since it looked like it had been left for over a day. I felt morally responsible to discard it because (at least, imo), it was trash, so once we picked it up, we would have been contributing to littering by putting it back down, and it was kind of sharp, so I didn't want a kid or animal to stumble upon it. I also thought it was unlikely that anyone else would throw it out.
My SO's perspective: We could not have been 100% certain it was cheap, and the owner might have retraced their steps to find it. Perhaps it was a gift, and it wasn't my place to decide what is and isn't trash in this case just because I thought it was cheap.
While this isn't exactly tearing the relationship apart, it was about the same level of "importance" to us, so it's been a topic of mild discussion--if it had been important to him, I probably would have left it, and if it had been important to me, he probably would have dropped the issue, but, for both of us, this is about a 2 on a scale of 1-10. We both agreed that this is probably a gray area where reasonable minds could disagree, and we've agreed that in the future, we'll only throw things like this out if every party involved agrees it is trash. So perhaps "a-hole" is not the right word, but we were curious where others would have landed and their reasoning in case something like this ever came up again.
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