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It’s interesting, there’s 2 times you can learn about who someone really is: Make things hard and take away their power, or make things easy and give them power.

You never know, people who are really good in one circumstance are really bad in the other or vice versa. You see it though, people who were decent when they were poor or even when things were normal; give them an ounce of power over others and suddenly they become tyrants. It’s an easy thing to fall into, especially when you have never been trained in the exercise of power and you think that once you have power you have a duty to use it early and often.

In such I think you can see where a guilt based ethic is so important -- having a good internal model of what a good and just person looks like and striving to be that person. Most people would look at a tyrant from outside a system and go "obviously that's the bad guy, he's abusing his power and harming others in the process", but if they end up in such a situation themselves they may be too concerned with chasing a theoretical ideal or some other piece of the puzzle rather than the holistic view of whether you're still a person you can look in the mirror and be proud of.