SUNSTEIN ON MORAL HEURISTICS: I’ve just finished reading Cass Sunstein's short essay on “Moral Heuristics” (available on ssrn.com), and I’m torn. On the one hand, I think, in general, he’s got an interesting an even valid point: that the heuristics we use in everyday moral situations can in some cases seriously lead us astray. I think his point is especially well taken when he attacks the use of absurd hypotheticals in a lot of moral argument – we’re asked to imagine a far out, unlikely, scenario, and then to register our intuitions about it, and we’re supposed to trust that our intuitions will give us reliable, bankable answers in those cases. But this seems implausible: why suppose that intuitions that work in ordinary cases will be trustworthy in bizarre hypotheticals?

On the other hand, there’s a pervasive bias that runs through the piece, and that is the bias that cost benefit analysis is the standard for rational ethical thought, if not constitutive of it. The result of this is that any putative moral principles that yield outcomes that are not cost benefit rational, are deemed irrational – the consequence of moral heuristics gone astray. This is obviously a deeply controversial assumption. Take for example a case Sunstein considers under the heading “pointless punishment.” A jury, when asked to decide a punishment for a polluter, has to choose between the two options of between making a company pay to clean up its own waste and making the company pay the same amount to clean up the dangerous waste of another company (a company now no longer around). Juries, it turns out, choose the former punishment over the later. Sunstein writes of this choice, “How could this preference make sense? Why should a company be asked to engage in a course of action that costs the same but that does much less good? I believe that people are using a heuristic, essentially requiring people to correct their own wrongs, even in a case in which that heuristic leads to palpably inferior results.”

Here I think the moral heuristic approach to ethical argumentation has all the advantages of theft over honest toil. I mean, it’s one thing to give an argument against the principle that people should correct their own wrongs, and quite another to dismiss the principle on the grounds that it’s a “heuristic.” And what is the reason for treating it as a heuristic rather than a principle? As far as I can see, it is because it leads to palpably inferior results, results that won’t wash in a cost benefit analysis of the situation. But this just begs the question against those who would rely on the principle that one should right one’s own wrongs, and who believe this is a moral principle that “makes sense.” It’s sometimes the case that heeding a moral principle will lead to inferior results on a utilitarian calculus. But this isn’t an argument for ditching the principle.

I say it’s fine to be a pragmatist, utilitarian, whatever. But be up front about it, say why the principles people sometimes employ in their reasoning are irrational. Don’t simply presume rationality is cost benefit analysis, and then go on to condemn some principles on the basis that they are mere “heuristics” that are misfiring in this case, because leading to inferior results. There are more things in morality than results.

- posted by Chad @ Sunday, July 27, 2003