Supervisors often prefer rule breakers, up to a point

Fundamentally, rules almost always come with compromises — for the sake of making rules understandable by humans, they have to be relatively simple. Simple rules for complex situations will always forbid some amount of good behaviour, and allow some bad behaviour. Many of society's parasites live in the space of "allowable bad behaviour", but there is a lot of value to knowing how to exploit the "forbidden good behaviour" space.

Example?

For which side?

Most examples boil down to common sense. Nobody is going to arrest a 14 year old for driving their dying parent to the hospital.

Similarly, it is reprehensible but legal to pull up a chair and watch a child drown in a pool.

There is a difference between law and morality, and humans will use the second to selectively enforce the former.

> Similarly, it is reprehensible but legal to pull up a chair and watch a child drown in a pool.

In which country? Even for the US I don't believe the law system is that crappy.

> In which country? Even for the US I don't believe the law system is that crappy.

There's video from a few years back that shows very American cops standing outside a burning house at night, knowing there was a young child still in it. A passing pizza delivery dude[1] rescued the 6-year old, handed her to cop, and ended up requiring hospitalization. In the online discussion, everyone called the rescuer a hero, but I don't recall seeing a single condemnation of the cops (a "first-responder") who didn't enter the burning house.

edit: 1. the hero's name is Nick Bostic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBlE52qKKuw

A burning house is not "a pool".

In my country you can't watch a kid drowning in a pool* but you are not obligated to help anyone in a burning house, since that would put you in danger too. I assume it is the same ~everywhere in the world, including the US.

* assume rescuing would be fairly safe, you are a good swimmer, you have lifeguard education, the weather is nice and the kid is small. AFAIK rescuing drowning people is dangerous as they can pull you down.

A drowning child is of fairly limited threat to an even halfway competent adult swimmer. Even at maximum panic/flailing, they just don't have the mass or strength to prevent you from at least treading water.