Thinking and Deciding

412 MORAL JUDGMENT AND CHOICE
Naturalism
Naturalism is the bias toward nature. It is also related to omission bias, because
“nature” often defines the default situation, the result of inaction, as in the case of
the vaccination, where the disease can be assumed to be natural. (Of course, the
result of omission is not always natural, as in the case of the dictator just described.)
Chapter 20 presents evidence that people regard harms caused by people as worse
than otherwise equivalent harms caused by nature. Spranca (1992) found that people
would often pay extra to drink “natural water” rather than water that had been distilled
and then had exactly the right chemicals added to it so that it was chemically
identical to natural water. Baron, Holzman, and Schulkin (1998) found that many
doctors would prefer to give “natural” hormones to menopausal women, rather than
chemically identical synthetic hormones.
Physical proximity
People consider harm to be worse when it involves physical contact with the victim.
For example, people regard it as worse to “push a man off of a footbridge and in front
of a train in order to cause the man to fall and be hit by the train, thereby slowing
it and saving five people ahead on the tracks” than to “pull a lever that redirects a
trolley onto a side track in order to save five people ahead on the main track if, as a
side-effect, pulling the lever drops a man off a footbridge and in front of the train on
the side tracks, where he will be hit” (Cushman, Young, and Hauser, 2006).
Other possible biases, already mentioned earlier in this chapter, include relativism,
moral realism, and the existence of moralistic values and protected values.
Let me emphasize again that the term “bias” here, as elsewhere in this book, is
not pejorative. A finding of bias in judgment does not mean that the judge should be
punished or condemned. It does mean that she should be educated if that is possible,
and if we have sufficient confidence in our normative model. We must bear in mind
that we can make both kinds of errors: miseducating someone who doesn’t really
need it and failing to educate someone who does need it. In real prescriptive situations,
you might want to take some small risk of miseducation errors. Note also that
education here means persuasion not indoctrination. Without understanding, utilitarian
moral principles are far less likely to be used correctly, and understanding can be
achieved only by giving reasons.
In sum, then, we have two different reasons for looking for nonutilitarian biases.
First, from the perspective of psychological theory, utilitarianism serves as a kind of
null hypothesis. Judgments that we should do the most good are easy to explain in
many ways and do not enlighten us much about the psychology of moral judgment. If
everyone said that only the amount of harm mattered and not whether it was indirect
or direct, this would be easy to explain in terms of a general principle that moral
intuitions are designed to prevent harm. If this were the only principle that people
used, it could be explained in so many ways as to be uninformative.