Instead of being (the only) moral agent, imagine yourself in a role of a coordinator of the moral agents. You specify their algorithm, they execute it. Your goal is to create maximum good, but you must do it indirectly, through the agents.
Your constraints at the good maximizations are the following: Doing good requires spending some resources; sometimes a trivial amount, sometimes a significant amount. So you aim at a balance between spending resources to do good now, and saving resources to keep your agents alive and strong for a long time, so they can do more good over their entire lifetimes. Furthermore, the agents do kind of volunteer for the role, and more strict rules statistically make them less likely to volunteer. So you again aim at a balance between more good done per agent, and more agents doing good.
The result is a heuristic where some rules are mandatory to follow, and other rules are optional. The optional rules do not slow down your recruitment of moral agents, but the ones who do not mind having strict rules are provided an option to do more good.
Second order effects, indeed.
Instead of being (the only) moral agent, imagine yourself in a role of a coordinator of the moral agents. You specify their algorithm, they execute it. Your goal is to create maximum good, but you must do it indirectly, through the agents.
Your constraints at the good maximizations are the following: Doing good requires spending some resources; sometimes a trivial amount, sometimes a significant amount. So you aim at a balance between spending resources to do good now, and saving resources to keep your agents alive and strong for a long time, so they can do more good over their entire lifetimes. Furthermore, the agents do kind of volunteer for the role, and more strict rules statistically make them less likely to volunteer. So you again aim at a balance between more good done per agent, and more agents doing good.
The result is a heuristic where some rules are mandatory to follow, and other rules are optional. The optional rules do not slow down your recruitment of moral agents, but the ones who do not mind having strict rules are provided an option to do more good.