It does vary a lot from system to system and version to version. But people will always find a way to make a big deal over alignments and sometimes its understandable. I tihnk I have a whole pantheon of gods designed just to deal with the various inter-character problems who apparently my friends use in their games these days. 'Anewbis, protector of new players and first-game-session characters', and 'Anarchis, sodomizer of rules-laywers' apparently being the favorites.

Things like this pop up, especially under less forceful DMs, resolve it with a dice roll, like odds-evens to decide if the questionable act broke alignment, I used to make players roll on my random insanity table whenever the broke alignment so a lot were careful on those grounds, although a lot of times the random insanity table gave benefits, I think Sociopath gave a bonus to round 1 initiative, I think a lot of them tried to go insane in some games. It's all about trying to change conflict situations into something fun instead, trying to solve a dispute fairly never works as well as dealing with it in game somehow.