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I think the real scissor here is between European and North American cultural norms. A while ago I left my jacket in my friends room in a European hotel. I had no connection to the room otherwise and my friend was busy. I walked to the front desk, asked for a room key, was given it and got my jacket. No questions asked anywhere. In NA all the norms pertaining to rules are a lot more absolute. I was once nearly thrown out of a games convention because I wasn't wearing my badge around my neck and only presenting it to the guards at the entrance because "the rules". To the European brain this is inconveivable because there's some sense in which it's common sense that the badge is for getting past security so even if the rules say "you have to wear it" on paper everybody would be fine with accomplishing the functional understanding. Same here, to most north Americans there is a big deontological category "lying" or "stealing" in this squarely fits the definition. To me very obviously, taking an item somebody else doesn't want isn't stealing, the category of stealing is about making sure people's property isn't taken away. This reads closer to dumpster diving than taking an item from the supermarket to me very obviously. BUT in there is an explicit step to switch to second order reasoning that uses something like intent instead of categorical enforcement of norms - which requires incidentally a different kind of high social trust about the intent of the people involved. In this particular kind of social trust Europe is a higher trust society than North America. I'm guessing most of this pretty straightforwardly falls out from historical contigency, where the US had to operate at a very different scales, so more explicit/simpler norms are needed (or reddotairplane.gif). Also I think an important reason why reasnoning about e.g. Scandinavian countries doesn't just translate the US 1 to 1. Also often this is hardcoded into the system in a way. Where e.g. another place where I've encountered this before: I wear contacts and ran out while in the US. I tried to buy some. They told me I needed a US prescription or I could go fuck myself because those are the rules. I was thoroughly confused why nobody would sell me this harmless object I clearly know I need, why the employees can't just sell me that, when a friend pointed out that they'd potentially be fired for this under threat of the legal system. Both sides look like barbarians to the other because they're violating their own versions of high trust, but it's not actually a low trust phenomenon but slightly different flavours of high trust clashing.
@moissanist Handling of lost & found boxes is often very informal. The only consistent policy where I've worked was if the lost item is a phone, the person needed to show me they could unlock it. With clothes, knowing the item was there was usually proof enough.
@moissanist is the scissors about whether you expect the real owners to recover their item from lost and found? I expect that hence this feels like stealing, you don't hence this feels like circumventing a silly barrier to recover something that would otherwise be thrown away
@moissanist > taking an item somebody else doesn't want The premise of 'lost and found' is that that the item *is* wanted. Grabbing the **nicest** scarf in the box makes "doesn't want" much less likely. If she had grabbed the cheapest / shittiest scarf it would be far less egregious.
@moissanist in my experience it's exactly the opposite. in the US most people are either too dumb or too rebellious to follow any but the most basic rules, and most actual rules are emergent. whereas in Europe (particularly Germany & the UK) the letter of the law is often followed.
@moissanist Feeling into it a bit more i think it's specifically bohèmian norms that celebrate this kind of thing as savoir-vivre. And bohèmian norms are culturally strong among fashionable europeans age 30 and up (i grew up in them). Think Before Sunrise as an aesthetic