rules, rules everywhere

Something that struck me as interesting was the question posed to rule egoism about rationality’s compatibility with the rules in rule egoism. There are certain times where the universal rule will dictate that you must do one thing, while rationally you, the agent, would be better off doing something else. In this case, the rules are set as a universal maxim such as “in most cases the agent will benefit the most from action A rather than action B, therefore the agent must perform action A.” But there can be times where this not true. The rules are made in regards to something like percentages it seems. In most cases A is the best action with the best results for the agent, therefore the agent should do A. As Kagan says, maybe this is not actually irrational. Maybe just conforming to the set of best rules is rational in itself; if something works 95 percent of the time, maybe acceptance of that 5 percent is something that you must do. It does not seem likely that one could come up with a system that would work completely 100 percent of the time.

I was curious as to an example of a rule that would normally lead the egoist in the “rational” direction but only sometimes led him in an “irrational” less beneficial direction. Take the case of cleaning. Let’s say there is a rational rule that an agent should keep his or her apartment clean. A guy, R, lives alone, he cleans his apartment. This means that he does not get bugs, or rats. He keeps himself away from many diseases by having a clean apartment. This is beneficial to him. Say then, that he gets a roommate, Q. He needs to have this roommate in order to stay in his apartment, he cannot really afford it if he does not have a roommate. Say Q starts leaving trash and dirty dishes everywhere. R knows that if he starts cleaning up after Q then Q will always take advantage of him, and will never learn to clean for himself. It seems as though R should leave Q’s mess out for him, so he can deal with it until he reaches a breaking point and starts to clean. It seems that rationally R should not have to clean Q’s messes, but the rule says that he must. R must clean in order to stick with the rules, even though, in the long run leaving the messes for Q to get frustrated with will benefit R more. It will benefit R more because it will mean a clean house with less work on his part. But the rule tells him otherwise, the rule sends him down a path of instant, yet fleeting betterment which overall, will do him less benefit.