Ah. I see. It's only when money is involved that it becomes wrong?
Who said that? We’re talking about a potential fraudulent act, and you’ve come up with a list of transgressions that you consider to be comparable. I’m asking why they are comparable, since lying to get into the theme park deprives somebody else of revenue and it’s not clear how the others would.
So, to use one of your examples above, anyone who kindly tells their friend that they look nice at an event when they really don’t, is as bad a somebody who commits fraud or steals?
Aside from the fact that you didn't use one of my examples, you made up a new one...
No, I didn’t. The first item on your list was ‘smoothing over a conversation to avoid awkwardness’. I’m interested in why you think doing so is as bad as stealing from a third party.
No. I think life is complex and these things are often somewhere on a scale. As in, I don't think getting a ticket in this example anywhere near bad enough to warrant the shit dealt to the OP on this thread.
Do you agree that it’s wrong, then? I don’t recall anybody saying that the OP would have committed a serious crime, but she asked for approval for doing something that is wrong, and came up with a parade of silly excuses. The latter is what she got the shit for. As a PP noted, if she just came out and said, “I know it’s wrong, but I’m doing it anyway”, she wouldn’t have had half of the criticism. It’s her attempts to justify it that are embarrassing.
And yes. I get consider it wrong to give an OP such a harsh judgement for an act, all the time knowing you (the general you, not you specifically) also do things that would attract similar judgement from others. But that you keep quiet about.
The debate on this thread has centred on the OP’s justification for the act, not the act itself. She asked whether she would be wrong to lie about her son’s age to get into Chessington free.
She got her answers: “yes, I would!”, or “no, it’s dishonest”. She tried to argue against the latter point of view by trotting out a parade of excuses, using self-serving arguments she hadn’t thought through. That’s what was judged.
Are you of the opinion that nobody should ever judge anybody else? If you were called up for jury service, would you try to get out of it by confessing that you once embellished your CV or pretended that you’d made more progress on a work project than you really had? Would you bar somebody from serving as a judge because they slowed down before a speed camera but “kept quiet about it”?