Rules and responsibility

Rules of all kinds help us make good decisions all day long, but how does that affect our responsibility for these decisions?

Decision-making is effortful. Even if we have only two options to choose from, they often both have numerous pluses and minuses that need to be weighed up. Thankfully, we can often rely on rules that act as shortcuts and take much of that hard work away.

Many such rules we develop and adopt ourselves. After using the toilet, we don’t every time consider the upsides and downsides of washing our hands — it is a habit we mindlessly carry out. Neither do we spend a lot of time, every week, working out whether we will do the shopping on Friday evening, Saturday afternoon, or — why not indeed? — on Wednesday after work. Most of us have a routine, same day, same time, that we follow pretty well. And we all make use of heuristics: we associate certain brands of products with the features we value and choose on that basis, rather than by time and time again evaluating all the alternatives.

Other rules are imposed on us by others, but we still mostly happily embrace them. If, as is the case for most workers, our employer tells us which days and hours to work, we conform and fit our lives around these rules. Picture the counterfactual, in which we’d have…