Thinking and Deciding

390 MORAL JUDGMENT AND CHOICE
We thus speak of moral intuitions, rather than heuristics. But, like heuristics, they
may be slightly off, producing good results — corresponding to the reasons people
have for wanting each other to follow them — in some cases and less good results
in others. I shall thus take the view that we can talk about biases in moral judgment,
just as elsewhere. And I shall assume a simple normative model.
In this chapter and those to follow, I shall take the view that utility theory can be
extended straightforwardly to deal with choices that affect the utility of many people.
This amounts to utilitarianism, a controversial moral philosophy first systematized
by Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century (1789) and developed further by John
Stuart Mill (1863), Henry Sidgwick (1874/1962), Richard M. Hare (1981), John
Broome (1991), Peter Singer (1993) and others. I shall not fully defend this theory
here. But it has the advantage of being fully consistent with other ways of developing
utility theory, such as expected utility theory. And even those who do not accept it
may find it useful for analyzing the consequences of choices.
It might seem possible to bypass moral questions entirely. Instead of this chapter,
I could have a chapter about “good decisions that affect other people.” I could
argue that we analyze such decisions simply by extending utility theory to cover
these cases, without mentioning the fact that this extension amounts to utilitarianism,
which is traditionally part of moral philosophy rather than decision theory. The
trouble with such an effort to bypass moral judgment is that morality in general (utilitarian
or not) concerns itself with the very same decisions ...,maybe not all of them,
but a lot of them. Often, when someone argues for some policy on the ground that it
has the best overall expected consequences (i.e., maximizes expected utility), someone
else will argue that the policy is immoral. Thus, we cannot avoid a discussion of
morality and what it is. Utilitarians, of course, see no conflict between morality and
“good decision making” in general.
What are moral judgments?
We can begin to understand morality by asking about the functions that it serves.
Morality involves telling each other what we should do, or otherwise trying to influence
each other’s decision making. We can express morality, as a way of influencing
others, in several ways: teaching principles directly by explaining them or by expressing
moral emotions; setting examples of how to behave; gossiping (and thereby
expressing principles by presupposing them when we criticize others — seeSabini
and Silver, 1981); rewarding behavior that follows the principles and punishing behavior
that violates them; supporting or violating institutional (family, governmental)
laws or rules (depending on what we think of their morality); supporting or opposing
such laws or rules, making or repealing them; or justifying them in hindsight by
referring to norms, which are then supported by the appeal. The concept of morality
can be seen as arising as an abstraction from all of these situations (Singer, 1982).
Although “morality” may have other meanings, this is the meaning that is relevant to
decision making.