You're deciding how to respond to a repeated failure or bad behavior, and you want the consequence to teach, not just punish, or you want to see what a flaw looks like from outside.

Dante names the rule in Inferno XXVIII, out of the mouth of the poet who sowed discord: "Thus is observed in me the counterpoise" — Longfellow's rendering of contrapasso. Every punishment mirrors the sin: the sin stripped of its self-justification, made visible and permanent. It runs both directions: read a punishment and you can reconstruct exactly what the sin was, because the punishment is the sin seen honestly. A consequence shaped like the action is self-documenting. It teaches without a lecture.