Mental health issues aren’t an excuse to cheat. If you can’t do the work, tell the professor about your situation instead of breaking the rules. Everyone has shit to deal with—some single mom was up all night with the baby and still did her work on her own and followed the rules.
And that’s literally the reason to understand people and help them rather than punish. I hope you’ll never experience how shitty life circumstances can be, and how fragile your own mind can be.
You can understand people when they’re honest and ask for help up front, not when they make excuses after they get caught breaking the rules. The latter warrants only swift and sure punishment, to reinforce the social norms.
That's still an argument for being graceful with failures, not for excusing dishonesty. It's really, truly, not that complicated. Civilization cannot function properly when dishonesty is accepted. (ed: To be clear, this is not a hypothetical problem. We're already in trouble due to erosion of trust.)
Understanding dishonesty and forgiving in it in some cases is ok. Note it’s very different from the world where dishonesty is accepted. There are a lot of cases and a lot of circumstances, not all of them should be treated equally. Seeing it black and white especially in environment where, for example, the president do corruption all the time, only will increase sense of unjust, and dishonesty itself.
If the rules aren’t applied equally the similarly situated people, they will break down entirely. And pointing to supposed corruption elsewhere in society is how third worlders justify their own low level corruption in those countries.
> in some cases is ok. Note it’s very different from the world where dishonesty is accepted.
"In some cases", maybe. In a world where the majority of cases are effectively punished, we could start talking about that. Today, we live in the world where it's accepted, even when the offender is just an entitled college brat. We should change that.
Oh, and "but my boss/my friends/the president does it" remains exactly as valid excuse as it always has.
