Summary
Preferences and Rational Choice: New Perspectives and Legal Implications
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Value analysis of political behavior - self-interested, moralistic, altruistic, moral.
I distinguish four types of goals: self-interested, altruistic, moralistic, and moral. Moralistic goals are those that people attempt to impose on others, regardless of the others' true interests. These may become prominent in political behavior such as voting because such behavior has relatively little effect on self-interested goals. I argue (sometimes with experimental evidence) that common decisional biases concerned with allocation, protected values, and parochialism often take the form of moralistic values. Because moralistic values are often bundled together with other values that are based on false beliefs, they can be reduced through various kinds of reflection or "de-biasing."
If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice.... (1) INTRODUCTION The quality of government is a major determinant of the quality of people's lives. Underdeveloped countries suffer from misguided economic policies, such as price controls and subsidies, overinvestment in arms and underinvestment in health and education, excessive regulation, and corruption. Developed countries also suffer from unbalanced national budgets, inefficient subsidies, and other ills, but the developed countries generally have better government. World problems, such as depletion of fisheries, suffer from a lack of regulation and international institutions. (2) In the long run, and sometimes in the short run, government policy depends on the political actions and omissions of citizens. But the individual citizen typically has little influence. Thus, one of the most important determinants of our well-being is controlled almost completely by our collective behavior but is affected very little by our individual behavior. This situation contrasts with that in a free market for goods and services, where our well-being is also affected by our decisions, but individual decisions have a direct effect on individual outcomes. In political behavior--such as voting, responding to polls, trying to influence others, writing letters, or making contributions of time and money--our little actions are pooled together to make one huge decision that affects us all. This situation opens up the possibility that political behavior is less sensitive to its consequences for the decision maker, and more sensitive to other factors such as emotions and, I shall argue, moral (or moralistic) principles. (3) Political behavior might therefore be more subject to decisional biases, fallacies, and errors than is market-oriented behavior. (4) This insensitivity to consequences, if it happens, is interesting for the study of rational decision making. It raises special questions, and I want to address some of these issues. First, I describe a distinction among types of values, which is the main point of this Article. Next, I summarize some experimental evidence about how people think about their values. I assume utilitarianism as a normative theory, as a standard against which I compare people's judgments and decisions. This theory is defended elsewhere. (5) Utilitarianism enjoins us to make decisions that produce the best consequences on the whole, for everyone, balancing the gains and losses. If we fall short of this standard, then we make decisions that make someone worse off--relative to the standard--without making anyone better off to an extent sufficient to balance the harm. Utilitarianism, then, has at least this advantage: if we want to know why decisions sometimes yield consequences that are less good than they could be on the whole, one possible answer is that people are making decisions according to principles that are systematically nonutilitarian, and they are getting results that follow their principles rather than results that yield the best outcome. (6) A. Types of Goals Decisions are designed to achieve goals, or (in other words) objectives or values. Goals may be understood as criteria for the evaluation of decisions or their outcomes. (7) I use the term "goals" very broadly to include (in some senses) ev...See the full content of this document
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