Thinking and Deciding

Chapter 16
Moral judgment and choice
No, you never get any fun
Out of the things you haven’t done.
Ogden Nash
Moral thinking is important for decision making as a whole, because most real decisions
involve moral issues, at least because they affect other people. The choice
of one’s work, for example, is often considered to be a purely personal decision, but
we can do various amounts of good or harm to others by choosing different paths
through our working lives. The saintly aid worker who risks death in order to fight
an epidemic in a poor region, on the one hand, and the Mafia don who bleeds the rich
and poor alike, on the other, are only the extremes of a continuum on which each of
us has a place. Likewise, personal relationships are not really so “personal” when
they involve promises that are kept and broken, expectations of loyalty that are set
up and violated, and responsibilities that are fulfilled or neglected. Of course, certain
issues much more obviously involve moral questions, especially those that arouse
political passion: abortion, property rights, capital punishment, and aid for the poor.
The most basic moral judgments are statements about what decision someone in
a certain situation, or a certain kind of situation, should make. Should Susan have an
abortion? Should legislators or judges change the law concerning abortions? Should
Henry join an antiwar demonstration? Unlike other judgments about what someone
should decide to do, moral judgments have a special character: They are impersonal.
That is, they are meant to ignore the identity of the relevant people, so that they apply
to anyone in the same situation. If it is wrong for me to steal a book from the library,
then it is wrong for you, too, if you are in exactly the same situation.
Moral rules are taught to us as children, because our parents and others have good
reason to want us to follow these rules. As a result, we become committed to them,
possibly more than to other heuristic rules that we use for judgments and decisions.
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