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That's a great point and in retrospect so obvious that I'm surprised it didn't occur to me before.
This sort of ties back into the original topic about principles. One thing that has seemed obvious to me for a while is that, given everything we know about psychology and the science of self-serving biases, if someone actually wants to be principled, they must meaningfully question their own principles with the presumption that the reason they adopted those principles is because doing so is beneficial to themselves, not because those principles are actually the good/right/just principles. Without doing so, they're merely someone who has naked self-interest as their principle and are really good at hiding that from themselves.
Given that, someone who really cares about being principled would fight for their principles in cases that offer them little benefit with just as much (actually, even more, given what we know about biases in perception) vigor as in cases that offer them a lot of benefit, and likewise in cases where following those principles would harm them. It's only by taking a costly action by focusing on things that would be of little personal benefit at the cost of things that would be of great personal benefit or by outright calling for something that would harm oneself that one can actually prove to oneself that one believes in those principles rather than adopting them out of convenience.
Having observed the culture wars over the past decade or so, I must admit that my estimation for how principled people tend to be has dropped considerably.
Yes! This is right on. Old Man Waterfall from Futurama nailed this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ay1MGWeWLtA
Bonus: they even predicted the fall of the ACLU!
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