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ArisKatsaris comments on Seeking advice on a moral dilemma - Less Wrong
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In this situation, and most commonplace situations, your decision theory still roughly summarizes to "not being a dick".
That not-being-a-dick can be subsumed into a more general acausal decision theory, is much like the way Newtonian physics was subsumed into Einsteinian physics.
Newtonian physics will still give you a mostly correct answer in most commonplace situations for normal human beings. And so will the not-being-a-dick decision theory for the commonplace situation described in the post above. And much like Newtonian equations over Einsteinian ones, it's often easier for human minds to calculate.
I don't think that's what's going on here. The claim that
1) one should act ethically, and that
2) acting ethically includes the vague-but-intuitive class of "not being a dick"
goes against the general trend here of saying that,
a) Morality is non-reductionist or otherwise just a fancy term for preferences [1], and
b) You should only care about the consequences your actions cause.
Summarizing one's justification here as "I don't want to be a dick" is therefore not a simplification[2], but a repudiation of what seems to be "the rationalist answer" here. That's why I said it gave off a vibe of, "but, but, rationalists can be nice too! We'll make an exception for that!"
[1] or whatever the heck EY's point was with his meta-ethics series
[2] though it's defensible as such a simplication for cases where being a dick is immediately visible to others, like I mentioned in another response here
Which gets slightly complicated if you think about the recursive implications.