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Notes -
I find it interesting that Americans in general tend to often fall back to interrogating themselves with "what would I wish for if it happened to me?" when resolving questions of crime and punishment and ethical dilemmas. In terms of my own cultural programming, this seems wrong and immoral, and somewhere in a class with determining ethical conduct in retail by asking "what would I do in this store if I were absolutely sure that nobody could punish me for it?", which I guess you could simply call sociopathy. (In fact, to me, to proactively give up some of what you would and could claim for yourself seems like the essence of prosocial behaviour.) I can't pinpoint at what point and how it was conveyed, but if this is a European-American difference, it may explain why American prison terms and conditions are so notoriously draconian in comparison to ours.
I imagine you'd protest the comparison between shoplifting/abusing the staff and visiting punishment upon those who wronged you, but then I'd wonder what is the salient difference. If it's that your victimhood in the latter case gives you moral license to take more of the pie, well, you've now justified victimhood olympics (another very American phenomenon); if it's the detail that the case you are imagining involves your daughter and rules against selfishness do not apply if you are acting to defend someone else, you've justified a whole array of /r/talesfromretail stories involving motherly Karens.
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