Thinking and Deciding

396 MORAL JUDGMENT AND CHOICE
Moral realism
A final type of judgment concerns moral realism (Greene, in press). People differ
in whether they think that moral judgments can be objectively true, in the way that
“2 +2=4” is true, or in the way in which scientific knowledge can be true. The
alternative is that moral judgments are subjective, more like tastes, and that they
legitimately differ from person to person. Kohlberg (following Piaget) thought that
moral realism was a property of lower stages.
It may seem difficult to make moral judgments that are universal and independent
of what others think, without thinking of them as objective. Yet, it is possible. We
can think of these judgments as like decisions. A rational decision for me depends
on my own values and beliefs. The same may be true of moral judgments. Moral
judgments may be seen as decisions about what to endorse for others to do.
Utilitarianism as a normative model
The idea of moral principles as what we endorse for others to follow can help us
decide which principles are worth endorsing. Of course we already have moral principles
among our goals for ourselves and others. We might find it useful to start
from scratch, putting aside the moral judgments we have already made and the goals
that arise from these judgments. We can then ask ourselves what principles we have
reason to endorse. By putting aside our current moral views, we make sure not just
to endorse the beliefs we have. We can see whether these principles, or some other
principles, would be rational to endorse, for someone who as yet had no moral principles
at all. Such a person would still have to have some altruism though. The goal
of wanting others to achieve their goals is crucial to any moral motivation. Without
it, people would have little reason to endorse any moral principles at all. (And
altruism is not itself a moral principle, but more like a basic motivation.)
Under these conditions — starting with altruism and no goals derived from moral
judgments — we have reason to endorse the view that the morally best thing to do
is whatever achieves everyone’s goals the most (Baron, 1993b, 1996). We would
want to endorse this principle because it would help to achieve the goals we already
have, specifically our altruistic goals. If we assume that we can somehow add goal
achievement, or utility, across people, this view is a form of utilitarianism.
The basic idea of modern utilitarianism is that we treat each moral decision as
a choice among competing acts. Each act has certain consequences, with different
probabilities, for certain people. To decide which act is morally best, we simply add
up the expected utilities of the consequences for all of the people. The best acts are
those with the highest expected utility, across all of the people.
Moralistic goals
This approach to utilitarianism, in terms of endorsement of options that achieve everyone’s
goals, generally excludes “moralistic goals” as misguided. These are goals