Thinking and Deciding

UTILITARIANISM AND FAIRNESS 421
has been supported by many other experiments. If this is generally true, it makes us
less concerned with victims of all sorts whom we feel we cannot help: victims of
rape, of other crimes, of disease, of poverty, of having the wrong parents, of being
born in the wrong country.
In sum, people desire to see fairness. They will try to bring about fairness, even
when utility is not maximized, and even when they must sacrifice to bring it about.
When they cannot bring it about, they will try to deceive themselves into thinking
that things are fair.
Utilitarianism and fairness
Equity theorists also maintain that people want rewards and punishments to be proportional
to “inputs.” It is often unclear what the inputs are, though. Colleges in the
United States typically allocate financial aid according to need, but graduate schools
typically do not. Should need be an input? In assigning grades, should a teacher consider
ability, effort, or just the end result? What is the input here? If some citizens
contribute more than others, why should each citizen have one vote? Why doesn’t
each stockholder have only one vote? Is the size of an investment an input? Should
criminal penalties depend only on the magnitude of the crime? If so, are we wrong
to excuse people who are insane?
I suggest that it is useful here, as elsewhere, for us to consider the normative
theory — to ask ourselves, “Just what is the ultimate goal we are trying to achieve?,”
before we ask about people’s actual judgments. We may want to consider prescriptive
theory as well. Although the philosophical accounts of fairness are rich and varied
(for example, Nozick, 1974; Rawls, 1971), I shall concentrate here on the utilitarian
account (Baron, 1993b, 1996), mentioning in passing where other accounts disagree
with it.
Utilitarians have both a simple answer and a complex answer to the problem of
fairness. The simple answer is that we should strive to maximize utility. When asked
how to do that, another simple answer is that it depends on the details of the case
at hand. This is not very helpful guidance. The more complex answer is to present
several principles that need to be considered. Let us look at some of these.
Declining marginal utility. If you are asked to distribute $1,000 between two
anonymous people, neither of whom you would ever see again, what would you do?
Most people would divide the money equally. According to utilitarianism, this is
normatively correct if we assume that the utility of money is marginally declining
(Chapter 10). If two people have the same marginally declining utility function for
money, and if we consider changing away from a fifty-fifty split, the utility benefits
for one person that result from having a greater share will be more than outweighed
by the utility of the losses for the other person.
Even if the two people have different utility functions, equal division is still the
best solution, as long as we do not know which utility function is which, and as
long as both are marginally declining. We would want to make the division in order