Thinking and Deciding

234 NORMATIVE THEORY OF CHOICE UNDER UNCERTAINTY
Utility is not the same as pleasure. The concept of utility respects the variety of
human goals. It represents whatever people want to achieve. Some people do not
want pleasure as much as they want other things (such as virtue, productive work,
enlightenment, respect, or love — even when these are painful things to have). The
utility of an outcome is also different from the amount of money we would pay to
achieve it. Money is not a universal means to achieve our goals. As the Beatles said,
“Money can’t buy me love,” and there are many other things that money cannot buy.
Utility is also not quite the same thing as “happiness,” for we are happy, in a sense,
if we expect to achieve our goals, even if we are not now achieving them (Davis,
1981). 1 Finally, utility is not the same as “satisfaction,” which is the feeling that
comes from achieving our goals. We do not experience the achievement of many
of our goals, but that makes them no less important in our decision making. Many
composers, for example, strongly desire that their music be played and enjoyed long
after they are dead. Those who have achieved this important goal have not had the
satisfaction of achieving it.
“Utility” is a bad word. It means “usefulness,” as if outcomes had value only
because they were useful for something else. But utility is supposed to be a summary
measure of how consequences realize our ultimate values or goals. The word “good”
would probably be better. Utility is the amount of good or goodness (Broome, 1991).
But most people use “utility,” so I will stick with it.
At the outset, you may wonder whether this thing exists, or whether asking about
the goodness of consequences is like asking about the redness of sounds. People can
probably agree, more often than not, that one sound is redder than another, but that
does not imply any reality. Consequences differ in ways that make them difficult to
compare: they are of different kinds, and they affect different people. Perhaps they
have no property of goodness that can be compared in the way required.
One answer to this objection is that our choices reveal our utilities, so utilities
must be real as explanations of what we choose. (Many economists say this.) For
example, if we choose to pay a dollar for an apple, then the apple must have more
utility than the money, and if we then choose to keep the second dollar rather than
buy a second apple, then the second apple must have less utility than the first (or the
second dollar, more). This answer is not fully satisfactory, because it assumes that
our choices do maximize our utility, yet we do not want to assume this if we want to
use the theory to evaluate choices. A normative model should be able to tell us when
our choices do not maximize utility. Still, the idea that utility should determine our
choices helps give the idea meaning, in ways that go beyond the redness of sounds,
a judgment that has no implication for what anyone should do. It makes sense to say
that, when we spend a dollar for an apple, we implicitly make a judgment that the
apple has more utility than any alternative use of the dollar at the moment. We can
and do compare the goodness of very different sorts of things.
1 Happiness in this sense — the feeling that comes from the expectation of achieving our goals — can
be, but need not be, a personal goal. We can want to achieve our goals yet not care whether or not we
expect to achieve them. If we try to pursue this kind of happiness as a goal, we can achieve it all too easily
by deceiving ourselves into believing that our other goals will be achieved.