Nobody likes rules that are excessive or poorly chosen, or bad application of rules. I like rules that do things like[1]:
Prohibit others from doing things that would harm me, where either I don’t want to do those things, or I prefer the equilibrium where nobody does to that where everybody does.
Require contributing to common goods. (sometimes)
Take the place of what would otherwise be unpredictable judgments of my actions.
For each of these, the answer about whether the rule is good depends on what margins we’re talking about.
For example, lets take your first point, rules that “prohibit others from doing things that would harm me”. One way in which you could be harmed is by someone selling a drug to you which has negative side-effects which out-weigh the positive side-effects. Therefore should we ban the selling of those drugs?
I think we shouldn’t. Not only do people have a right to put whatever they want in their body which this infringes upon, but the cost of actually following this rule is much higher than the benefit of being able to not (as the seller, selling to many) worry about whether there’s a 1% chance this particular customer regrets their purchase.
You may not agree with the sign of that particular example, however, generally speaking, there are costs to following rules, outside of poorly chosen rules or bad application of rules. If the benefit to your rule is less than the cost of following that rule, then no matter how well the rule is chosen or how benevolent the application, its a bad rule!
And note that as the number of rules grows, the cost of following all of them does too (sometimes super-linearly, as rules can interact), while the benefit of the marginal rule decreases. Therefore there’s an optimal number of rules, and we should expect that on average adding a new rule is just bad[1].
I will also note that this point was made in the comment you were responding to
Second, rules are costly to follow: you need to pay attention and remember all relevant rules and calculate all ways they interact.
When I feel like I have an excuse for why I should get special treatment, even though I wouldn’t say this excuse was reasonable if someone else tried to use it
This seems a bit tautological… since roughly half the population is below average in virtue, and will engage in all sorts of bad behavior if they think they can get away with it. Partly because we define good and bad relative to the population average.
And for most of the rest, strong enough incentives can induce them to behave the same, it happens even on this very forum, so when combined that’s most people already.
Nobody likes rules that are excessive or poorly chosen, or bad application of rules. I like rules that do things like[1]:
Prohibit others from doing things that would harm me, where either I don’t want to do those things, or I prefer the equilibrium where nobody does to that where everybody does.
Require contributing to common goods. (sometimes)
Take the place of what would otherwise be unpredictable judgments of my actions.
not a complete list
For each of these, the answer about whether the rule is good depends on what margins we’re talking about.
For example, lets take your first point, rules that “prohibit others from doing things that would harm me”. One way in which you could be harmed is by someone selling a drug to you which has negative side-effects which out-weigh the positive side-effects. Therefore should we ban the selling of those drugs?
I think we shouldn’t. Not only do people have a right to put whatever they want in their body which this infringes upon, but the cost of actually following this rule is much higher than the benefit of being able to not (as the seller, selling to many) worry about whether there’s a 1% chance this particular customer regrets their purchase.
You may not agree with the sign of that particular example, however, generally speaking, there are costs to following rules, outside of poorly chosen rules or bad application of rules. If the benefit to your rule is less than the cost of following that rule, then no matter how well the rule is chosen or how benevolent the application, its a bad rule!
And note that as the number of rules grows, the cost of following all of them does too (sometimes super-linearly, as rules can interact), while the benefit of the marginal rule decreases. Therefore there’s an optimal number of rules, and we should expect that on average adding a new rule is just bad[1].
I will also note that this point was made in the comment you were responding to
Assuming we in a rule-optimal society, I think few would argue we make too few rules in general.
Yes, but for most people, in practice a “bad application” of rules means “the rules being applied to me.”[1]
That’s the primary sense in which people don’t like rules.
When I feel like I have an excuse for why I should get special treatment, even though I wouldn’t say this excuse was reasonable if someone else tried to use it
This seems a bit tautological… since roughly half the population is below average in virtue, and will engage in all sorts of bad behavior if they think they can get away with it. Partly because we define good and bad relative to the population average.
And for most of the rest, strong enough incentives can induce them to behave the same, it happens even on this very forum, so when combined that’s most people already.