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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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You're not looking at this correctly. No one congratulates themselves for returning the cart.
The point here is that the simple act of returning the shopping cart is the baseline of ethical behavior. This is just illustrating that society's individualism is so strong that this simple act of spending 10 seconds to keep the place in order is often ignored.
Of course people that return the shopping cart can be ignorant assholes as well. But the point is that this extremely basic act is severely lacking in society. Therefore we can't expect, as you said, more advanced ethical values. Such as using one's time and energy to promote changes to other foreign countries
I mostly posted my rant just to be contrary, but I still feel like there is something erroneous to this argument, even tho you do make it seem clear and sensible.
I offer Japan as an example: the whole country is very neat, tidy and orderly. People know that if you see garbage, or something out of place, you put it where it belongs. People take the personal responsibility to clean up after themselves very seriously, and willingly clean up after eachother. As it was explained to me, 'If you're the first person to see it, then you are the person to take care of it."
So you would expect this baseline indication of ethical behavior to translate into other domains. Surprisingly, people who as a group score very well on this test of self-regulation and ethical behavior seem to have a systemic problem with violence, sexual abuse and sexual harassment against women. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/3/8/sexual-assault-in-japan-every-girl-was-a-victim
It could be that individuals not putting things away is a sign of a deeper societal issue, but group/individual fastidiousness doesn't seem to generalize to broader ethical adherence.
Maybe there is a mistake somewhere in my thinking.