Thinking and Deciding

UTILITARIANISM AS A NORMATIVE MODEL 397
leading us to endorse principles for others that do not arise from their goals. They are
like endorsing the universal consumption of beer because you happen to like it. Of
course, it isn’t usually about beer. It is about fashion, religious piety and observance,
aesthetic taste, and life style. Most of these kinds of moralistic principles come from
moral principles that people already hold. (Principles of style can be moral if they
are endorsed for others.) The argument I have made gives no reason to endorse these
goals to someone who does not already have them.
Baron (2003) found that people endorsed moralistic goals for banning actions
like the following:
• testing a fetus for IQ genes and aborting it if its expected IQ is below average
• cloning someone with desired traits so that these may be passed on, such as an
athletic champion or brilliant scientist
• modifying the genes of an embryo so that, when it is born, it will have a higher
IQ
• giving a drug (with no side effects) to enhance school performance of normal
children
In many cases (22% of examples like these), subjects (recruited on the World Wide
Web) would ban these actions even if the consequences of allowing the actions were
better on the whole than the consequences of banning them, if the subjects could
imagine that the consequences might be better, and if “almost everyone in a nation
thought that the behavior should be allowed.” In sum, they were willing to impose
their moral(istic) principles on others, whatever the consequences, and whatever the
others wanted.
Frequently asked questions about utilitarianism
To ward off potential confusion, let me answer a few common questions.
What if people want something that is wrong?
First, utilitarianism is not the view that the right answer to moral questions should be
decided by adding up people’s moral opinions; in fact, we might even want to exclude
such opinions from a utilitarian analysis on the ground that prior belief often does
not reflect our best thinking (Baron, 1986). In the nineteenth century, for example,
many people favored the institution of slavery so much that they desired that slavery
continue to exist, as a moral goal, just the way some of us today desire that other
people be prohibited from having (or that they be allowed to have) abortions. If
such desires had been considered in a utilitarian analysis of slavery, they might have
been strong enough to tip the balance in its favor. Because utilitarian analysis, like
decision analysis, is a way of determining what our action should be, both kinds of
analysis should exclude prior desires concerning the action itself (as opposed to its