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Blueberry comments on Rebasing Ethics - Less Wrong
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I deliberately chose an innocuous example so as to not overly trip the discussion into the specifics of the example itself. I'm not going to talk about some of the more extreme examples of what this would imply until other people do.
You're correct in that modifying tipping behavior by itself would probably not be worth being a dick about in the same way that just switching to low fat milk is probably not worth absorbing all of our science of nutrition & dieting about. You have to be able to see the cumulative effects of a complete rebasing before you can judge it's ultimate utility.
As for whether it's worth it, I think you need to look at where a person wants to be vs where they actually are. Looking out in the world, I don't see a lot of rationalists of the type who inhabit this board who are rich, powerful, admired, have happy marriages or have fulfilled the potential they believe they have. I'm not promising that you'll have all of that if you just rebase your ethics but If you happy not to try just so you can keep your warm fuzzy moral feelings, that's, of course, your own choice.
I assume the point is to then use the money you save in the most moral way possible. If you're a utilitarian, this would then mean spending it in the way that creates the highest utility. An ethical hedonist might spend it on "hookers and blow". If you have a more relational view of ethics, the most moral way to use it is to tip in the first place, though.
The extreme would be to create a huge business empire based on poor-quality products, like, I don't know, a buggy operating system or something. Break the law at every turn as long as you can get away with it, commit numerous antitrust violations, take open standards and slightly modify them so nothing else is compatible with your company's products. Then take all your profits and set up a charitable foundation, and donate billions to, I don't know, improve global health or something.