Value analysis of political behavior - self-interested, moralistic, altruistic, moral.

• Author: Baron, Jonathan
• Position: Preferences and Rational Choice: New Perspectives and Legal Implications

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)

1. 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) everything a person values. Behavior is rational to the extent to which it achieves goals. Rational political behavior will not happen without goals.

   Goals, in the sense I describe, are criteria for evaluating states of affairs. They are reflectively endorsed. They are the result of thought and are, in this sense, "constructed" in much the way that concepts are the result of reflection. Goals are not simply desires, and very young children might properly be said to have no goals at all, in the sense at issue. Your goals fall into four categories: self-interested, altruistic, moralistic, and moral. These correspond to a two-by-two classification. One dimension of this classification is whether or not your goals depend on the goals of others. The other dimension is whether they concern others' voluntary behavior.

   For Your Behavior For Others' Behavior Dependent on Others' Goals Altruistic Moral Independent of Others' Goals Self-Interested Moralistic The idea of dependence on others' goals assumes that goals are associated with the individuals who have them. Your goals are contingent on your existence. If you were never born, no goals would be yours. (8) Your self-interested goals are those that are yours, in this sense. Altruistic (and moral) goals are goals for the achievement of others' goals. Your altruistic goals concerning another person are thus a replica in you of the other person's goals. Altruism may be limited to certain people or certain types of goals. But it rises or falls as the goals of others rise and fall. (9)

   We have goals for what other people do voluntarily. The behavior of others is a kind of consequence, which has utility for us. But this type of consequence has a special place in discussion of social issues. It is these goals for others' behavior that justify laws, social norms, and morality itself. When you have goals for the behavior of others, you apply criteria to their behavior rather than to your own. But of course these are still your own goals, so you try to do things that affect the behavior of others. (10) When we endorse behavior for others, we want them to want to choose it.

   What I call "moral goals" are goals concerning the behavior of others so as to achieve their goals as well as your own. These are "moral" in the utilitarian sense only. In fact, they are the fundamental goals that justify the advocacy of utilitarianism. (11) I shall return to these goals.

   By contrast, moralistic goals are goals for the behavior of others that are independent of the others' goals. People could want others (and themselves) not to engage in homosexual behavior, or not to desire it. (12) Other examples abound in public discourse, including: antipathy to drug use; enforcement of particular religions against other religions; and promotion of certain tastes in fashion, personal appearance, or artistic style against other tastes. (13)

   Often the public discourse about such things is expressed in the language of consequences. Moralistic goals usually come bundled with beliefs that they correspond to better consequences (a phenomenon that has been called "belief overkill"). (14) For example, opponents of homosexuality claim that the behavior associated with it increases mental disorders, and this argument, if true, is relevant to those who do not find homosexuality inherently repugnant.

   The people whose behavior is the concern of moralistic goals could be limited to some group. Your goals for others' behavior could be limited to others who share your religion or nationality, for example. In a sense, altruism can be limited, but truly moral goals cannot. You can have altruistic goals toward only certain other people, not caring about the rest. But if you have goals for others' behavior based only on these altruistic goals, these goals are actually moralistic, not altruistic, because they are independent of the goals of those outside of your sphere of altruism. This is just a consequence of the way I have defined "moralistic." We might want to distinguish moralistic goals that come from limited altruism from those that come from self-interest alone (which I shall discuss shortly).

   In sum, unlike moral goals, moralistic goals can go against the goals of others. When moralistic goals play out in politics, they can interfere with people's achievement of their own goals. That is, if we define "utility" as a measure of goal achievement, moralistic goals decrease the utility of other goals. They need not do this if enough people have the same goals for themselves as others have for them. But the danger is there, especially on the world scale or in local societies with greater diversity of goals.

   Moral goals may also involve going against the goals of some in order to achieve the goals of others. But moral goals are those that make this trade-off without bringing in any additional goals of the decision maker about the behavior of others.

   Altruism and moralism are difficult to distinguish because of the possibility of paternalistic altruism. A true altruist may still act against your stated preferences, because these preferences may depend on false beliefs and thus may be unrelated to your true underlying goals. (15) Undoubtedly, moralists often believe that they are altruists in just this way. The experiments I review later, (16) however, will suggest that some moralism does not take this form. People think that their values should sometimes be imposed on others even when they (ostensibly) agree that the consequences are worse and that the others involved do not agree with the values being imposed. Moreover, even when people think that they are being paternalistically altruistic, they may be wrong. Although underlying goals are difficult to discover and somewhat labile, their existence is often a matter of fact.

   Because other people's moralistic...