Ownerless Treasure Morality

There's an item, usually a treasure, which has no owner that people know of and therefore, as the old saying states, finders keepers. If the treasure is in plain sight, one might wonder why no one has claimed it yet.

There are a number of reasons why a character might be opposed to taking the treasure:

• It could be cursed to bring misfortune or disaster to whoever claims it.
• It could be in some way important to the area it's in, possibly providing some sort of magical blessing (especially if it's a single object rather than a hoard).
• It could be too dangerous to fall into the wrong hands.
• It could be viewed as blood money tainted by the way it was acquired by its former owners. (Though this may be remedied by giving it away instead of taking it for yourself).
• The treasure could be a Secret Test of Character designed to weed out the greedy.
• It could be worth more as a source of archaeological knowledge than a simple collection of trinkets to be sold off.
• It could be viewed as belonging to the people of the country it was found in, even after its original owners were long gone. (Most common in real life).
• Or it could simply be a matter of respect for the dead, with taking their belongings considered taboo even after their death.

This situation occurs occasionally in Real Life, and is known as a "treasure trove". Essentially, if you were to find in most nations a pirate treasure/buried hoard/vast treasure, or even just one ancient coin or artifact made of precious metals or of historic interest and value, you are legally obligated to report it to the authorities first for any number of reasons:

• They would need to determine that the find really is so old as to have no reasonable owner, as opposed to some ancient coins that were in a collection that had been recently stolen and buried;
• In some places, the treasure belongs to the crown or government if it is declared bona vacanta, and so it is their property (in these cases, the government may or may not pay a generous "finder's fee" to the person who uncovered the treasure);
• In others, the treasure belongs to the property owner, in a bid to prevent amateur treasure-hunters from trespassing and digging up someone else's property, elsewhere the government may make the finder of the treasure and the owner of the property it was found on split the find;
• The government may also take historical interest in ancient heritage and would take steps to make sure that artifacts are not taken out of the country and instead are preserved for the nation as a whole;
• At least in parts of the US, police officers and other public officials are not allowed in general to lay claim to treasure trove to prevent conflicts of interest;
• And, of course, when all else fails, the authorities want their cut of the taxes on the value of the gold, silver, jewels, or whatnot.

Compare Money to Burn, which is when the money or treasure is actually destroyed, It Belongs in a Museum, when the treasure is taken to be kept in a museum (although it may overlap if the character who wants the treasure doesn't know its location IS the museum) and Schmuck Bait or Cursed Item if the treasure is a deliberate trap for the greedy. Contrast Inexplicable Treasure Chests and Kleptomaniac Hero, game tropes where "Finders Keepers" applies in earnest.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• El Caco Bonifacio: In one of the stories, people talk about a millionaire so tight-fisted he buried all his fortune under a statue. The story is about the titular thief trying to get said fortune.
• Mortadelo y Filemón: Played for Laughs in one story, where a cowboy digs near a petrol station and finds petroleum already refined. The station clerk approaches him to beat him up.

Films — Animation

• In Aladdin, the Cave of Wonders is absolutely loaded with treasure of all kinds which serves as one of the sentient cavern's two Secret Tests of Character—the first is that only a "Diamond in the Rough" can enter the cave, while the second states that the entrant must "touch nothing but the lamp." Though Aladdin is able to resist the temptation of the mountains of gold and jewels piled up inside, Abu can't help himself and tries to take a gem from a statue. This immediately causes the Cave of Wonders to start collapsing and all of the treasure to vanish; it's unclear whether or not Aladdin would have been able to keep it had he passed the cavern's test (and even if not, presumably the genie of the lamp would be able to provide even greater riches than the entire cave, but since the genie's masters are limited to Three Wishes, being able to take the treasure might have saved him one wish). It's possible (given the way it vanished) that it was merely an illusion to begin with.
• Treasure Planet: Captain Flint rigged the planet to explode if anyone takes his treasure, even after his death. Becomes Money to Burn after the protagonists take the treasure.

Films — Live-Action

• In Raiders of the Lost Ark, though the Ark is found in Egyptian ruins, it's not an Egyptian artifact — it's a Hebrew artifact that the ancient Egyptians stole. And as there was no nation of Israel in the 1930s, there's no country that can claim rightful ownership of it, removing any moral issues with our American heroes trying to grab it first.

Literature

• One of Jean de La Fontaine's fables has a miser bury gold somewhere, but he keeps going back to dig it up and check on it. Eventually this attracts the attention of a thief who digs it up in the miser's absence. When the miser comes back and panics at the theft, it's pointed out to him that he gets the same amount of profit from the gold now as he did before instead of investing it or spending it, he hasn't really lost anything.
  Why, then, be so wretched? for if you say true,
  You never touched it, plain the case;
  Put back that stone upon the place,
  'Twill be the very same to you.
• In The Lord of the Rings, various hobbits poke around Bag End, looking for the heaps of gold Bilbo brought back from their adventures in The Hobbit, reasoning that "legendary gold (mysteriously obtained, if not positively ill-gotten) is, as everyone knows, any one's for the finding — unless the search is interrupted".

Video Games

• Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia: Alm and his friends at one point defeat a band of pirates and find their hideout contains a great deal of gold and treasure, but only take the pirates' weapons with them, since they view the gold as dirty money.
• Defied in Genshin Impact: part of the Adventure Guild's rules is that "finders keepers". Also in Fontaine, the country known for its strict laws, it's mentioned that as long as treasures bear no mark that shows them as belonging to anyone, they're free to be taken.
• In the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers special episode "Here Comes Team Charm", the titular Team Charm is a treasure-hunting exploration team, who are looking for a treasure in Boulder Quarry. Once they discover that said treasure is a Time Gear, which is responsible for regulating the flow of time in the area, they refuse to take it on principle due to its importance.
• Professor Layton and the Curious Village: When Layton, Luke, and Flora find the Baron's fortune, Flora doesn't want it because it will deactivate the robotic inhabitants of St. Mystère. Since Flora rejected it, anyone who finds it afterwards wouldn't know about that fact, and even if they did, they might not care, since they're just robots, although a more kind-hearted person might try to find a way to both claim the fortune and keep the robots active.
• Shining Force II: Slade takes the Jewels of Light and Evil. There was no way for anyone to know they kept Zeon sealed.
• Shining Force III: When searching the ruins, the Force see the thieves as the bad ones for wanting to take an ownerless treasure just like them.
• Small Town Murders: Robert Van Santen was the evil guy not for wanting Barnaby Jarrow's treasure, but for murdering two people and trying to demolish someone else's house. Until the end of case 20, no one knew Salty Pete, being Barnaby Jarrow's descendant, was the legitimate owner of the treasure.
• Tactics Ogre: Azelstan's sidequest involves the Pirate's Graveyard, which is said to conceal a trove of stolen gold. In actuality there's a single chest full of coins and valuable oddities; the hidden cavern is marked by the swords of many fallen pirates with the chest as the cornerstone of their "sacred ground". The player's Chaos Frame can be affected by whether they unilaterally refuse the treasure (raises it), hesitate before declining it (stays put), or ultimately choose to take it (lowers it).

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Puss in Boots: No one can blame Puss for taking a single coin from San Lorenzo's treasures since Dulcinea didn't tell him before it would break the city's magic barrier. The thieves in the series have also done immoral acts, but trying to take the same treasure without knowing its function in the village isn't one of them (not that it would stop them anyway).
• In the Bluey episode "Turtleboy", Bingo finds a toy left behind at a playground and wants to take it home. Her father tells her that they'll leave it for a day and if its owner hasn't taken it back by then, then she can have it. This is what ends up happening, but he still feels uneasy about whether or not it's "the done thing". Ultimately, they decide to leave the toy behind permanently — not because they reach any moral certainty about it, but because they feel less anxious that way.

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