The game-theoretic function of law can make following those simple rules feel like losing something, taking a step backward. You don’t get to defect in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, you don’t get that delicious (5, 0) payoff instead of (3, 3). The law may punish one of your allies. You may be losing something according to your actual value function, which feels like the law having an objectively bad immoral result. You may coherently hold that the universe is a worse place for an instance of the enforcement of a good law, relative to its counterfactual state if that law could be lifted in just that instance without affecting any other instances. Though this does require seeing that law as having a game-theoretic function as well as a moral function.
Growing up I’ve been firmly in the camp of “rules and the law are bullshit!”. At the beginning of going down the rationality path, that meme was only bolstered by being able to see through people’s inconsistent explanations for why things were. I’ve since moved away from that, but this post made me realize that my old “rules are bullshit” attitude is still operating in the background of my mind and having a non-trivial negative impact on my ability to evenly apply my best approximation of the Law. There’s still a twinge of “this is stupid bureaucracy!” any time a rule inconveniently applies to me, and that feeling seems to mostly come from a shallow pattern matching of the situation.
Growing up I’ve been firmly in the camp of “rules and the law are bullshit!”. At the beginning of going down the rationality path, that meme was only bolstered by being able to see through people’s inconsistent explanations for why things were. I’ve since moved away from that, but this post made me realize that my old “rules are bullshit” attitude is still operating in the background of my mind and having a non-trivial negative impact on my ability to evenly apply my best approximation of the Law. There’s still a twinge of “this is stupid bureaucracy!” any time a rule inconveniently applies to me, and that feeling seems to mostly come from a shallow pattern matching of the situation.