BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17, 1-42

Printed in the United States of America

Nonconsequentialist decisions
Jonathan Baron
Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
19104-6196
Electronic mail: baron@cattell.psych.upenn.edu

Abstract: According to a simple form of consequentialism, we should base decisions on our judgments about their consequences for
achieving our goals. Our goals give us reason to endorse consequentialism as a standard of decision making. Alternative standards
invariably lead to consequences that are less good in this sense. Yet some people knowingly follow decision rules that violate
consequentialism. For example, they prefer harmful omissions to less harmful acts, they favor the status quo over alternatives they
would otherwise judge to be belter, they provide third-party compensation on the basis of the cause of an injury rather than the
benefit from the compensation, they ignore deterrent effects in decisions about punishment, and they resist coercive reforms they
judge to be beneficial. I suggest that nonconsequentialist principles arise from overgeneralizing rules that are consistent with
consequentialism in a limited set of cases. Commitment to such rules is detached from their original purposes. The existence of such
nonconsequentialist decision biases has implications for philosophical and experimental methodology, the relation between
psychology and public policy, and education.

Keywords: bias; consequentialism; decision; goals; intuition; irrationality; judgment; normative models; norms; omission; over-
generalization; utility

1. Introduction 1989 and Kyburg: "Induction and Probability" BBS 9(4)

Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato started a tradition of eval-
uating human reasoning according to standards that ap-
plied to the reasoning itself rather than to its conclusions.
We now maintain such standards through schools, child-
rearing, and public and private discourse. The best-
known standards apply to logic, and standards have also
been applied to practical and moral reasoning. To accuse
someone of being "illogical" or "unreasonable" is to ex-
press such standards, even when the accuser is motivated
by a dislike of the conclusion rather than the means of
reaching it.
A long tradition in psychology concerns the evaluation
of human reasoning with respect to standards of this sort.
Evaluation of reasoning was explicit in the study of logic
(Evans 1989; Woodworth & Schlosberg 1954) problem-
solving (Wertheimer 1959); cognitive development (e.g.,
Kohlberg 1970; Sharp et al. 1979); and the social psychol-
ogy of stereotyping, obedience to illegitimate authority,
excessive conformity, and self-serving judgments (Nisbett
& Ross 1980; Sabini 1992).
In the 1950s, this tradition was extended to the study of
judgments and decisions, using statistics, probability the-
ory, and decision theory as standards. Early results (Pe-
terson & Beach 1967; Tversky 1967) indicated that people
were at least sensitive to the right variables. For example,
people are more confident in numerical estimates based
on larger samples, although, not surprisingly, the effect of
sample size is not exactly what the formula says it should
be. Beginning about 1970, however, Kahneman and
Tversky (e.g., 1972) began to show qualitative departures
from these standards; for example, judgments are some-
times completely insensitive to sample size. [See also
Cohen: "Multiple Mechanisms for Partitioning: BBS 12(4)
1986. Ed.]
Allais (1953) and Ellsberg (1961) noted departures from
the expected-utility theory of decision making fairly early.
At the time, that theory was understood as both a norma-
tive model, specifying how people should make decisions
ideally, and as a descriptive model, predicting and ex-
plaining how decisions are actually made. Economists
were not bothered by the idea that a single model could
do both jobs, for they had clone well by assuming that
people are approximately rational. Demonstrations that
people sometimes violated expected-utility theory were
at first taken to imply that the model was incorrect both
descriptively and normatively (Allais 1953; Ellsberg
1961).
Kahneman and Tversky (1979) suggested that a dis-
tinction between normative and descriptive models was
warranted in decision making as well as elsewhere.
Expected-utility theory could be normatively correct but
descriptively incorrect. They proposed "prospect theory"
as an alternative descriptive model.
The suggestion that people were behaving nonnor-
matively was defended most clearly by reference to fram-
ing effects (Kahneman & Tversky 1984): people make
different decisions in (what they would easily recognize
as) the same situations described differently. For exam-
ple, most people prefer a 20% chance of winning $45 over
a 25% chance of $30, but if they have a 75% chance of
winning nothing and a 25% chance of a choice between
$30 for sure and an 80% chance of $45, they say they will
pick the $30 if they get the choice. The latter choice was
thought to result from an exaggerated weight given to
outcomes that are certain, a certainty effect. Presentation
of the gamble as a two-stage lottery induced subjects to
see the $30 as certain (if they got the chance to choose it).

© 1994 Cambridge University Press 0140-525X194 $5.00+.00

Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
Because such choices are, in a sense, contradictory, they
cannot be normatively correct. Hence, separate norma-
tive and descriptive models may be needed, and certain
rules of decision making (such as the certainty effect) may
be seen as errors, in the sense that they depart from a
normative model. Although Kahneman and Tversky did
not defend expected-utility theory itself, it seems that the
only way to avoid all the framing effects they have found is
to follow that theory (e.g., Hammond 1988).
I want to defend an approach to the study of errors in
decision making based on a comparison of decisions to
normative models. I shall argue that this approach is a
natural extension of the psychology of reasoning errors
and that it has some practical importance. Decisions (and
judgments) have consequences. By improving decisions,
we might, on the average, improve the consequences.
Many of the consequences that people often lament are
the result of human decisions, such as those made by
political leaders (and, implicitly, by those who elect
them). If we can improve decision making, we can im-
prove our lives.
Psychologists can make errors, too, but we can make
errors of omission as well as errors of commission. If we
fail to point out an error that should be corrected, the
error continues to be made. Errors of commission have an
extra cost. If we mistakenly try to change some pattern of
reasoning that is not really erroneous, we not only risk
making reasoning worse but we also reduce our credibil-
ity. Arguably, this has happened for many "pop psycholo-
gists." Still, we cannot wait for perfect confidence, or we
will never act. Academic caution is not the only virtue.
The basic approach I shall take here (Baron 1985;
1988a) is to consider three types of accounts or "models" of
decision making. Normative accounts are those that spec-
ify a standard by which decision making will be evaluated.
Descriptive accounts tell us how decision making pro-
ceeds in fact. Of particular interest are aspects of decision
making that seem nonnormative. If we find such phenom-
ena, we know there is room for improvement. Prescrip-
tive accounts are designs for improving decision making.
They can take the form of very practical advice for every-
day decision making (Baron et al. 1991) or formal schemes
of analysis (Bell et al. 1988). A systematic departure from a
normative model can be called an error or a bias, but
calling it this is of no use if the error cannot be corrected.
Therefore, the ultimate standards are prescriptive. The
prescriptive standards that we should try to find will
represent the best rules to follow for making decisions,
taking into account human limitations in following any
standard absolutely. Normative standards are theoretical,
to be appealed to in the evaluation of prescriptive rules or
individual decisions.
In the rest of this target article, I shall outline a nor-
mative model of decision making. I shall then summarize
some departures from that model, mostly based on my
own work and that of my colleagues. Most of these
departures involve following rules or norms that agree
with the normative model much of the time. Departures
based on more pernicious rules (e.g., racist ones) doubt-
less occur too, but less often. I shall discuss the meth-
odological implications of these departures for philosophy
and psychology and their prescriptive implications for
public policy and education.
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
2. Consequentialism as a normative model
Here, I shall briefly defend a simple normative model
according to which the best decisions are those that yield
the best consequences for achieving people's goals. Goals
are criteria by which people evaluate states of affairs, for
example, rank them as better or worse. Examples of goals
are financial security, maintenance of personal relation-
ships, social good, or more immediate goals such as
satisfying a thirst.
Various forms of consequentialism have been devel-
oped, including expected-utility theory and utilitari-
anism. I have defended these particular versions else-
where (Baron 1993b). For present purposes, consequen-
tialism holds simply that the decision should be deter-
mined by all-things-considered judgments of overall ex-
pected goal achievement in the states to which those
decisions immediately lead. In this simple form of conse-
quentialism, the states are assumed to be evaluated ho-
listically, but these holistic evaluations take into account
probabilities of subsequent states and the distribution of
goal achievement across individuals. Suppose, for exam-
ple, that the choice is between government programs A
and B, each affecting many people in uncertain ways. If I
judge that the state of affairs resulting from A is, on the
whole, a better one than that resulting from B for the
achievement of goals, then consequentialism dictates that
I should choose A. It is irrelevant that program B may,
through luck, turn out to have been better. In sum,
judgment of expected consequences should determine
decisions.
To argue for this kind of consequentialism, I must ask
where normative models come from, what their justifica-
tion could be. I take the idea of a normative model to be an
abstraction from various forms of behavior that I de-
scribed at' the outset, specifically those in which we
express our endorsement of norms (in roughly the sense
of Gibbard 1990), that is, standards of reasoning. The
basic function of such endorsement is to induce others to
conform to these norms. What reasons could we have for
endorsing norms?
Self-interest and altruism gives us such reasons. Self-
interest gives us reason to endorse norms, such as the
Golden Rule, with which we exhort others to help us or to
refrain from hurting us. Altruism motivates the same
norms: we tell people to be nice to other people. And
altruism gives us reason to endorse norms for the pursuit
of self-interest. We care about others so we want to teach
them how to get what they want. Indirectly, advocacy of
such norms helps the advocate to follow them, so we also
have a self-interested reason to endorse them.
It might be argued that norms themselves can provide
reasons for their own endorsement. For example, those
who think active euthanasia should be either legal or
illegal want others to agree with them. But in any inquiry
about what norms we should endorse, it is important that
we put aside the norms we already have, lest we beg the
question. In thinking about my own normative standards,
I put aside the goals that derive from those standards,
although I must treat other people's goals as given when I
think about what is best for them.
If goal achievement gives us reasons to endorse norms,
then, other things being equal, we should endorse norms

that help us achieve our goals (collectively, because our
reasons are both altruistic and selfish). Other things are
equal, I suggest, because we have no other reasons for
endorsing norms. Goals are, by definition, the motives
we have for doing anything. We need not decide here on
the appropriate balance of goals of self versus others. This
issue does not arise in the examples I shall discuss.
For example, consider two possible norms concerning
acts and omissions that affect others. One norm opposes
harmful acts. Another opposes both harmful acts and
omissions, without regard to the distinction. The second
norm requires people to help other people when the
judged total harm from not helping exceeds that from
helping. Harm includes everything relevant to goal
achievement, including effort and potential regret.
Which norm should I want others to follow? If others
follow the first, more limited, norm, my goals will not be
achieved as well, because I would lose the benefit of
people helping me when the total benefits exceed the
costs. I therefore have reason to endorse a norm that does
not distinguish acts and omissions, and I have no reason to
distinguish acts and omissions as such in the norms I
endorse. Once I endorse this norm, those who accept it
will want me to follow it, too, but if I hold back my
endorsement for this reason, I will lose credibility (Baron
1993b).
Suppose 1 have a goal opposing harmful action but not
opposing harmful omission. This goal is not derived from
my moral intuitions or commitments, which we have put
aside. In this case, I would have reason to endorse the
limited norm. The more people who have such a (non-
moral) goal, the more reason we all have to endorse this
norm (out of altruism, at least). But consequentialism
would not be violated, for adherence to the norm would in
fact achieve people's nonmoral goals. Although this argu-
ment leads to a consequentialist justification for a norm
distinguishing acts and omissions, the argument is contin-
gent on a (dubious) assumption about human desires.
Consider the case of active versus passive euthanasia.
Suppose we believe that there are conditions under
which most people would want life-sustaining treatment
withheld but would not want to be actively killed. Then, if
we do not know what a patient wants, this belief would
justify a distinction. However, if we know that the patient
has no goals concerning the distinction, we have no reason
to make it on the patient's behalf. (Likewise, the slippery-
slope argument that active euthanasia will lead to reduced
respect for life depends on a contingent fact that could be
taken into account if it were true. The slippery slope could
also go the other way: refraining from active euthanasia
could lead to errors of misallocation of resources and the
consequent neglect of suffering.) Our decision would
depend on whether death itself was to be preferred, not
on the way in which death comes about (assuming that the
means of death have no other relevant consequences of
their own for people's goals). In sum, we do not neces-
sarily have any reason to want each other to honor a
principle distinguishing acts and omissions.
Consider another example. Suppose a girl has a 10 in
10,000 chance of death from a disease. A vaccine will
prevent that disease, but there is a 5 in 10,000 chance of
death from its side effects. The girl should endorse a norm
that tells you to give her the vaccine, assuming that this
Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
helps her achieve her goal of living. We would each want
one another to act in this way, so we all have reason to
endorse this norm. Following Hare (1963), I shall call this
kind of argument a Golden Rule argument.
If you have a goal of not putting others at risk through
acts in particular and if this inhibits you from vaccinating
the girl, she is hurt. She has reason to discourage you from
holding such a goal. It is in her interest for your goals
about your decisions to be concerned only with their
consequences. Of course, altruistically, she might be
concerned with your own goals about your decisions, so
she might conclude that it is on the whole better for you
not to vaccinate her. But she has no general reason - apart
from what she knows about you in particular - to endorse
a norm for you that prescribes nonvaccination. The norms
we have selfish reason to endorse are those concerned
only with consequences, because those are what affect us.
Even when we endorse norms out of altruism, we have
no general reason to endorse a norm treating acts and
omissions differently. You might have a goal of not Causing
harm to yourself through acts, so you might not vaccinate
yourself. Such a goal would make it more harmful for me
to force you to vaccinate yourself, for I would go against
that goal. But I have no reason, altruistic or selfish, to
endorse a norm that leads you to have such a goal if you do
not already have it, for it will not help you achieve your
other goals, or mine.
This kind of argument concerning the act-omission
distinction differs from other approaches to this issue (see
Kuhse 1987, for an enlightening review). Most of these
are based on intuitions about cases as data to be accounted
for (e.g., the articles in Fischer & Ravizza 1992). Yet, it is
just these intuitions that are at issue. I suggest that many
of them arise from overgeneralizations, to which people -
even those who become moral philosophers — become
committed in the course of their development. In this
case, for example, harmful acts are usually more inten-
tional than harmful omissions, and hence, more blame-
worthy. But intention is not different in the cases just
discussed. People continue to distinguish acts and omis-
sions, however, even when the feature that typically
makes them different is absent.
This same argument will apply to the other kinds of
norms I shall discuss. In general, the function of norma-
tive models for decision making (as described earlier) is
not served by any norms other than those that specify
attaining the best consequences, in terms of goal achieve-
ment. And those norms should not encourage people to
have any goals for decision making other than achieving
the best consequences. We might be able to go farther
than this, specifying norms for the analysis of decisions
into utilities and probabilities, for example, but the exam-
ples discussed do not require such analysis. (Although the
vaccination case involved probabilities, I simply assumed
that anyone would judge a lower risk of death to be a
better state of affairs: no trading off of probability and
utility was required.)
The upshot of this argument is that we have reason to be
disturbed, prima facie, when we find others making
decisions that violate consequentialism. On further inves-
tigation, we might find that no better prescriptive norms
are possible. But, unless this is true, these norms will lead
to decisions that prevent us from achieving our goals as
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
well as other decisions might. Our goals themselves,
including our altruistic goals, therefore, give us reason to
be concerned about nonconsequentialist decisions. What
we do about this disturbance is another question, to which
we might apply consequentialist norms.
3. Departures from consequentialism
I shall now present a few examples of possible violations of
consequentialism. I hope these examples make it plausi-
ble that nonconsequentialist thinking exists and matters,
even if each example is subject to one quibble or another.
3.1. Omission and status-quo bias. Kitov and Baron
(1990) examined a set of hypothetical vaccination deci-
sions like the one just described. We compared omission
and commission as options within the same choice. In one
experiment, subjects were told to imagine that their child
had a 10 out of 10,000 chance of death from a flu epidemic,
that a vaccine could prevent the flu, but the vaccine itself
could kill some number of children. Subjects were asked
to indicate the maximum overall death rate for vaccinated
children for which they would be willing to vaccinate their
child. Most subjects answered well below 9 per 10,000.
Of the subjects who showed this kind of reluctance, the
mean tolerable risk was about 5 out of 10,000, half the risk
of the illness itself. The findings were the same when
subjects were asked to adopt the position of a policy
maker deciding for large numbers of children. When
subjects were asked for justification, some said they
would be responsible for any deaths caused by the vac-
cine, but they would not be (as) responsible for deaths
caused by failure to vaccinate. When a Golden Rule
argument was presented (Baron 1992), the bias was
largely eliminated. Asch et al. (1993) and Meszaros et al.
(1992) have found that the existence of this bias correlates
with mothers' resistance toward pertussis vaccination
(which may produce death or permanent damage in a very
few children).
Other studies (Ritov & Baron 1992; Spranca et al. 1991)
indicate a general bias toward omissions over acts that
produce the same outcome. In one case used by Spranca
et al. (1991), for example, subjects were told about John, a
tennis player who thought he could beat Ivan Lendl only
if Lendl were ill. John knew that Ivan was allergic to
cayenne pepper, so, when John and Ivan went out to the
customary dinner before their match, John planned to
recommend to Ivan the house salad dressing, which
contained cayenne pepper. Subjects were asked to com-
pare John's morality in different endings to the story. In
one ending, John recommended the dressing. In another
ending, John was about to recommend the dressing when
Ivan chose it for himself, and John, of course, said noth-
ing. Of the 33 subjects tested, 10 thought that John's
behavior was worse in the commission ending; no subject
thought the omission was worse. Other studies (Baron &
Ritov, in press; Ritov & Baron 1992; Spranca et al. 1991,
Experiment 4) show that the bias toward omissions is not
limited to cases in which harm (or risk) is the result,
although the effect is greater when the decision leads to
the worse of two possible outcomes (Baron & Ritov, in
press).
Inaction is often confounded with maintaining the sta-
tus quo; and several studies have shown an apparent bias
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
toward the status-quo/omission option. People require
more money to give up a good than they are willing to pay
for the same good (Knetsch & Sinden 1984; Samuelson &
Zeckhauser 1988; and, for public goods, Mitchell & Car-
son 1989). Kahneman et al. (1990) showed that these
effects were not the result of wealth effects or other
artifacts. They are, at least in part, true biases. Although
Ritov and Baron (1992) found that this status-quo bias was
largely a consequence of omission bias, Schweitzer (in
press) found both omission bias without a status-quo
option, and status-quo bias without an omission option.
Baron (1992) and Kahneman et al. (1990) also found a pure
status-quo bias. Status-quo bias, like omission bias, can
result from overgeneralization of rules that are often
useful, such as, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
It is clear that omission and status-quo bias can cause
failures to achieve the best consequences, as we would
judge them in the absence of a decision. Possible exam-
ples in real life are the pain and waste of resources
resulting from the prohibition of active euthanasia (when
passive euthanasia is welcomed), the failure to consider
aiding the world's poor as an obligation on a par with not
hurting them (Singer 1979), and the lives of leisure (or
withdrawal from worldly pursuits) led by some who are
capable of contributing to the good of others.
3.2. Compensation. Compensation for misfortunes is of-
ten provided by insurance (including social insurance) or
by the tort system. The consequentialist justification of
compensation is complex (Calabresi 1970; Calfee &
Rubin, in press; Friedman 1982), but, in the cases consid-
ered here, compensation should depend on the nature of
the injury (including psychological aspects) and not other-
wise on its cause or on counterfactual alternatives to it.
(The compensation in these cases can help the victim, but
it cannot punish the injurer or provide incentive for the
victim to complain.) Any departure from this consequen-
tialist standard implies that some victims will be overcom-
pensated or others undercompensated, or both.
Miller and McFarland (1986) asked subjects to make
judgments of compensation. When a misfortune was
almost avoided, more compensation was provided than
when it was hard to imagine how it could have been
avoided. A possible justification for this difference is that
victims were more emotionally upset in the former case
than in the latter. Ritov and Baron (in press), however,
found the same sort of result when subjects understood
that the victim did not know the cause of the injury or the
alternatives to it. In all cases a train accident occurred
when a fallen tree was blocking the tracks. Subjects
judged that more compensation should be provided (by a
special fund) when the train's unexpected failure to stop
caused the injury than when the suddenness of the stop
was the cause. The results were the same whether the
failure was that of an automatic stopping device or of a
human engineer.
These results can be partially explained in terms of
norm theory (Kahneman & Miller 1986), which holds that
we evaluate outcomes by comparing them to easily imag-
ined counterfactual alternatives. When it is easy to imag-
ine how things could have turned out better, we regard
the outcome as worse. When subjects were told that the
outcome would have been worse if the train had stopped
(when it did not stop), or if the train had not stopped

(when it did), they provided less compensation, as norm
theory predicts. Likewise, they provided more compen-
sation if the counterfactual outcome would have been
better. But this information about counterfactuals did not
eliminate the effect of the cause of the outcome. Hence,
norm theory, while supported, is not sufficient to explain
all the results. Another source could be overgeneraliza-
tion of principles that would be applied to cases in which
an injurer must pay the victim. The injurer is more likely
to be at fault when a device fails or when the engineer fails
to stop.
A similar sort of overgeneralization might be at work in
another phenomenon, the person-causation bias. Here,
subjects judge that more compensation should be pro-
vided by a third party when an injury is caused by human
beings than when it is caused by nature (Baron 1992;
Ritov & Baron, in press). This result is found, again, when
both the injurer (if any) and the victim are unaware of the
cause of the injury or of the amount of compensation
(Baron 1993b), so that even psychological punishment is
impossible. For example, subjects provided more com-
pensation to a person who lost a job from unfair and illegal
practices of another business than to one who lost a job
from normal business competition (neither victim knew
the cause). The same result was found for blindness
caused by a restaurant's violation of sanitary rules versus
blindness caused by a mosquito.
This effect might be an overgeneralization of the desire
to punish someone. Ordinarily, punishment and compen-
sation are correlated, because the injurer is punished by
having to compensate the victim (or possibly even by the
shame of seeing that others must compensate the victim).
But when this correlation is broken, subjects seem to
continue to use the same heuristic rule. This sort of
reasoning might account in part for the general lack of
concern about the discrepancy between victims of natural
disease, who are rarely compensated (beyond their medi-
cal expenses), and victims of human activity, who are often
Compensated a great deal, even when little specific deter-
rence results because the compensation is paid by liability
insurance.
3.3. Punishment. Notoriously, consequentialist views of
punishment hold that two wrongs do not make a right, so
punishment is justified largely on the grounds of deter-
rence. Deterrence can be defined generally to include
education, support for social norms, and so on, but pun-
ishment must ultimately prevent more harm than it
inflicts. Again, I leave aside the question of how to add up
harms across people and time. The simple consequential-
ist model put forward here implies that, normatively, our
judgment of whether a punishment should be inflicted
should depend entirely on our judgment of whether
doing so will bring about net benefit (compared to the best
alternative), whether or not the judgment of benefit is
made by adding up benefits and costs in some way. (We
might want to include here the benefits of emotional
satisfaction to those who desire to see punishment inflic-
ted. But we would certainly want to include deterrent
effects as well.)
People often ignore deterrence in making decisions
about punishment or penalties. Baron and Ritov (in press
a) asked subjects to assess penalties and compensation
separately for victims of birth-control pills and vaccines
Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
(in cases involving no clear negligence). In one case,
subjects were told that a higher penalty would make the
company and others like it try harder to make safer
products. In an adjacent case, a higher penalty would
make the company more likely to stop making the prod-
uct, leaving only less safe products on the market. Most
subjects, including a group of judges, assigned the same
penalties in both of these cases. In another test of the
same principle, subjects assigned penalties to the com-
pany even when the penalty was secret, the company was
insured, and the company was going out of business, so
that (subjects were told) the amount of the penalty would
have no effect on anyone's future behavior. Baron et al.
(1993) likewise found that subjects, including judges and
legislators, typically did not penalize companies differ-
ently for dumping hazardous waste, whether the penalty
would make companies try harder to avoid waste or
induce them to cease making a beneficial product. It has
been suggested (e.g., Inglehart 1987) that companies
have in fact stopped making beneficial products, such as
vaccines, exactly because of such penalties.
Such a tendency toward retribution could result from
overgeneralization of a deterrence rule. It may be easier
for people - in the course of development - to understand
punishment in terms of rules of retribution than in terms
of deterrence. Those who do understand the deterrence
rationale generally make the same judgments - because
deterrence and retribution principles usually agree - so
opportunities for social learning are limited. Other possi-
ble sources of a retribution rule may be a perception of
balance or equity (Walster et al. 1978) and a generalization
from the emotional response of anger, which may operate
in terms of retribution (although it may also be subject to
modulation by moral beliefs; see Baron 1992).
A second bias in judgments of punishment is that
people seem to want to make injurers undo the harm they
did, even when some other penalty would benefit others
more. Baron and Ritov (1993) found that both compen-
sation and penalties tended to be greater when the
pharmaceutical company paid the victim directly than
when penalties were paid to the government and com-
pensation was paid by the government (in the secret-
settlement case described earlier). Baron et al. (1993)
found (unsurprisingly) that subjects preferred to have
companies clean up their own waste, even if the waste
threatened no one, rather than spend the same amount of
money cleaning up the much more dangerous waste of a
defunct company. Ordinarily, it is easiest for people
to undo their own harm, but this principle may be
overgeneralized.
Both of these biases can lead to worse consequences in
some cases, although much of the time the heuristics that
lead to them probably generate the best consequences.
These results, then, might also be the result of over-
generalization of otherwise useful heuristics.
3.4. Resistance to coerced reform. Reforms are social
rules that improve matters on the whole. Some reforms
require coercion. In a social dilemma, each person is
faced with a conflict between options: one choice is better
for the individual and the other is better for all members
of the group in question. Social dilemmas can be, and
have been, solved by agreements to penalize defectors
(Hardin 1968). Coercion may also be required to resolve
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
negotiations (even though almost any agreement would
be better for both sides than no agreement) or bring about
an improvement for many at the expense of a few, as when
taxes are raised for the wealthy. It is in the interest of most
people to support beneficial but coercive reforms, and
some social norms encourage such support, but other
social norms may oppose reforms (Elster 1989).
To look for such norms, Baron and Jurney (1993) pre-
sented subjects with six proposed reforms, each involving
some public coercion that would force people to behave
cooperatively, that is, in a way that would be best for
all if everyone behaved that way. The situations involved
abolition of television advertising in political campaigns,
compulsory vaccination for a highly contagious flu, com-
pulsory treatment for a contagious bacterial disease, no-
fault auto insurance (which eliminates the right to sue),
elimination of lawsuits against obstetricians, and a uni-
form 100% tax on gasoline (to reduce global warming).
Most subjects thought things would be better on the
whole if the reforms, as described, were put into effect,
but many oithose subjects said they would not vote for the
reforms. Subjects who voted against proposals they saw as
improvements cited several reasons. Three reasons
played a major role in such resistance to reform, as
indicated both by correlations with resistance (among
subjects who saw the proposal as improvements) and by
subjects indicating (both in yes-no and free-response
formats) that these were the reasons for their votes:
fairness, harm, and rights.
Fairness concerns the distribution of the benefits or
costs of reform. People may reject a generally beneficial
reform such as an agreement between management and
labor, on the grounds that it allocates benefits or costs in a
way that violates some standard of distribution.
Harm refers to a norm that prohibits helping one
person by harming another, even if the benefit outweighs
the harm and even if unfairness is otherwise not at issue
(e.g., when those to be harmed are determined ran-
domly). Whereas opposition to reform on the grounds of
fairness compares reform to a reference point defined by
the ideally fair result, opposition on the grounds of harm
compares it to the status quo. One trouble with most
reforms is that they help some people and hurt others.
For example, an increased tax on gasoline in the United
States may help the world by reducing CO 2 emissions,
and it will help most Americans by reducing the budget
deficit; but it will hurt those few Americans who are
highly dependent on gasoline, despite the other benefits
for them. The norm against harm is related to omission
bias, because failing to help (by not passing the reform) is
not seen as an equivalent to the harm resulting from
action.
A right, in this context, is an option to defect. The
removal of this right might be seen as a harm, even if, on
other grounds, the person in question is clearly better off
when the option to defect is removed (because it is also
removed for everyone else).
Subjects cited all of these reasons for voting against
coercive reforms (both in yes-no and open-ended re-
sponse formats). For example, in one study, 39% of
subjects said they would vote for a 100% tax on gasoline,
but 48% of those who would vote against the tax thought it
would do more good than harm on the whole. Subjects
thus admitted to making nonconsequentialist decisions,
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
both through their own judgment of consequences and
through the justifications they gave. Of those subjects
who would vote against the tax despite judging that it
would do more good than harm, for example, 85% cited
the unfairness of the tax as a reason for voting against it,
75% the fact that the tax would harm some people, and
35% the fact the tax would take away a choice that people
should be able to make. (In other cases, rights were more
prominent.) Removal of liberty by any means may set a
precedent for other restrictions of freedom (Mill 1859),
hence a consequentialist argument could be made against
coercion even when a simple analysis suggests that coer-
cion is justified. But no subject made this kind of argu-
ment. The appeals to the principles listed were in all cases
direct and were written as though they were sufficient.
Baron (1993b) obtained further evidence for the "do no
harm" heuristic. Subjects were asked to put themselves in
the position of a benevolent dictator of a small island
consisting of equal numbers of bean growers and wheat
growers. The decision was whether to accept or decline
the final offer of the island's only trading partner, as a
function of its effect on the incomes of the two groups.
Most subjects would not accept any offer that reduced the
income of one group to increase the income of the other,
even if the reduction was a small fraction of the gain, and
even if the group bearing the loss had a higher income at
the outset. (It remains to be determined whether subjects
think the subjective effect of the loss is greater than that of
the gain.) The idea of Pareto efficiency (Pareto 1971) may
have the same intuition origin.
Additional evidence for the role of fairness comes from
a number of studies in which subjects refuse to accept
beneficial offers because the benefits seem to be unfairly
distributed (Camerer & Loewenstein 1993; Thaler 1988).
In all of these studies of departures from consequential-
ism, it might be possible for someone who had made a
nonconsequentialist decision to find a consequentialist
justification for it, for example, by imagining goals or
subtle precedent-setting effects. Yet, in all these studies,
justifications are typically not of this form. Moreover, the
question at issue is not whether a conceivable consequen-
tialist justification can be found but, rather, whether
subjects faced with a description of the consequences,
divorced from the decisions that led to them, would judge
the consequences for goal achievement in a way that was
consistent with their decisions. It seems unlikely that
they would do so in all of these studies.
4. The sources of intuition
I have given several examples of possible nonconsequen-
tialist thinking. My goal has been to make plausible the
claim that nonconsequentialist decision rules exist and
that they affect real outcomes. Before discussing what, if
anything, should be done about these norms, we should
consider whether they are really as problematical as I
have suggested. One argument against my suggestion is
that these norms have evolved through biological and
cultural evolution over a long period of time, hence they
are very likely the best we can achieve, or close to the
best.
Like Singer (1981), I am skeptical. Although several
evolutionary accounts can explain the emergence of var-

ious forms of altruism as well as various moral emotions
such as anger (Frank 1985), I know of no such accounts of
the specific norms I have cited. (I could imagine such an
account for the norm of retribution, however, which
might arise from a tendency to counterattack.) Any ac-
count that favors altruism would also seem to favor conse-
quentialist behavior, and this would be inconsistent with
nonconsequentialist norms. Even an account of anger as a
way of making threats credible (Frank 1985) need not
distinguish between anger at acts and omissions. Indeed,
we are often angry with people for what they have failed
to do.
Even if norms have an evolutionary basis, we still do not
need to endorse them. As Singer (1981) points out in other
terms, evolution is trying to solve a problem other than
that of determining the best morality to endorse. A rule
might engender its own survival without meeting the
above criteria for being worthy of endorsement. For
example, chauvinism might lead to its own perpetuation
by causing nations that encourage it to triumph over those
that do not, the victors then spreading their norms to the
vanquished. Likewise, ideologies that encourage open-
mindedness might suffer defections at higher rates than
those that do not, leading to the perpetuation of a doctrine
that closed-minded thinking is good (Baron 1991). Such
mechanisms of evolution do not give us reason to endorse
the rules they promote. As Singer points out, an evolu-
tionary explanation of a norm can even undercut our
attachment to it, because we then have an alternative to
the hypothesis that we endorsed it because it was right.
Some have compared decision biases to optical illu-
sions, which are a necessary side effect of an efficient
design or adaptation (Funder 1987). Without a plausible
account of how this adaptation works, however, accep-
tance of this argument would require blind faith in the
status quo. More can be said, however. Unlike optical
illusions (I assume), nonconsequentialist decision rules
are not always used. In all the research I described, many
or most subjects did not show the biases in question.
Moreover, Larrick et al. (in press) found that those who do
not display such biases are at least no worse oft in terms of
success'or wealth than those who do. (Whether they are
morally worse was not examined.) Nonconsequential de-
cision making is not a fixed characteristic of our condition.
To understand where nonconsequentialist rules (norms)
come from, we need to understand where any decision
rules come from. I know of no deep theory about this. Some
rules may result from observation of our biological behav-
ioral tendencies, through the naturalistic fallacy. We ob-
serve, for example, that men are stronger than women and
sometimes push women around, so we conclude that men
ought to be dominant. Rules are also discovered by
individuals (as Piagetian theorists have emphasized); they
are explicitly taught (as social-learning theorists have
emphasized) by parents, teachers, and the clergy; and they
are maintained through gossip and other kinds of social
interaction (Sabini & Silver 1981).
If people evolved to be docile, as proposed by Simon
(1990), then we become attached to the rules that we are
taught by others. These rules need have no justification
for this attachment mechanism to work. Arbitrary rules
can acquire just as much loyalty as well-adjusted rules.
And, indeed, people sometimes seem just as attached to
rules of dress or custom that vary extensively across
Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
cultures as they are to fundamental moral rules that seem
to be universal (Haidt et al., in press).
Why would anyone invent or modify a rule and teach it
to someone else? One reason is that the teachers benefit
directly from the "students" following the rule, as when
parents teach their children to tell the truth, help with the
housework, or control their tempers. In some cases, these
rules are expressed in a general form ("don't bother
people," "pitch in and do your share"), perhaps because
parents understand that children will be liked by others if
they follow those rules. So parents teach their children to
be good in part out of a natural concern with the children's
long-run interests. Parents may also take advantage of
certain opportunities for such instruction: a moral lesson
may be more likely after a harmful act than after a failure
to help (unless the help was specifically requested).
Often, such rules are made up to deal with specific
cases, for example, "don't hurt people," in response to
beating up a little brother. We can think of such rules as
hypotheses, as attempts to capture what is wrong with the
case in question. It is useful to express the rules in a more
general form rather than referring to the specific case
alone ("don't twist your brother's arm"). But such general
rules are not crafted after deep thought. They are spur-of-
the-moment inventions, although they do help control
behavior for the better.
If the rule is badly stated, one corrective mechanism is
critical thought about the rule itself (Singer 1981). To
criticize a rule, we need to have a standard, a goal, such as
the test suggested earlier: is this a member of the set of
rules that we benefit most from endorsing? We also need
to have arguments about why the rule fails to achieve that
standard as well as it could, such as examples (like those I
gave earlier) where the rule leads to general harm. And
we need alternative rules, although these can eome after
the criticism rather than before it.
In the absence of such critical thought, rules may attain
a life of their own. They become overgeneralized (or the
rules that might replace them in specific cases are under-
generalized, even if they are used elsewhere). Because of
our docility, perhaps, and the social importance of moral
rules, our commitments to these rules are especially
tenacious. The retributive rule of punishment, "an eye for
an eye," was originally a reform (Hommers, 1986), an
improvement over the kind of moral system that led to
escalating feuds. But when applied intuitively by a court
to the cases of a child killed by a vaccine, with but
negligence, it is overgeneralized to a case where the rule
itself probably does harm (Baron & Ritov 1993; Oswald
1989 makes a similar suggestion).
Critical thought about moral rules undoubtedly occurs.
It may be what Piaget and his followers take to be the
major mechanism of moral development. The sorts of
experience that promote such thought may work because
they provide counterexamples to rules that have been
used so far. But critical thought is not universal. A princi-
ple such as "do no harm" may be developed as an admoni-
tion in cases of harm through actions. This principle may
then be applied to cases in which harm to some is
outweighed by much .greater good to others, such as
compulsory vaccination laws, fuel taxes, or free-trade
agreements. The application may be unreflective. The
principle has become a fundamental intuition, beyond
question.
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
Such overgeneralization is well known in the study of
learning. For example, Wertheimer (1959) noted that
students who learn the base-times-height rule for the area
of a parallelogram often apply the same rule inap-
propriately to roughly similar figures and fail to apply the
rule when it should be applied, for example, to a long
parallelogram turned on its side. Wertheimer attributed
such over- and undergeneralization to learning without
understanding. I have suggested (Baron 1988a) that the
crucial element in understanding is keeping the justifica-
tion of the formula in mind, in terms of the purpose
served and the arguments for why the formula serves that
purpose. In the case of the base-times-height rule, the
justification involves the goal of making the parallelogram
into a rectangle, which cannot be done in the same way
with, for example, a trapezoid.
Overgeneralization in mathematics is easily corrected.
In morality and decision making, however, the rules that
people learn arise from important social interactions.
People become committed to these rules in ways that do
not usually happen in schoolchildren learning mathemat-
ics. In this respect, overgeneralization also differs from
mechanisms that have been proposed as causes of types of
biases other than those discussed here, mechanisms such
as the costs of more complex strategies, associative struc-
tures, and basic psychophysical principles (Arkes 1991).
A defense of overgeneralization is that preventing it is
costly. Crude rules might be good enough, given the time
and effort it would take to improve them. Moreover, the
effort to improve them might go awry. People who reflect
on their decision rules might simply dig themselves
deeper into whatever hole they are in, rather than im-
proving those rules. We might also be subject to self-
serving biases when we ask whether a given case is an
exception to a generally good rule (Hare 1981), such as in
deciding whether an extramarital affair is really for the
best (despite a belief that most are not).
These defenses should be taken seriously, but their
implications are limited. They imply that we should be
wary of trying to teach everyone to be a moral philoso-
pher. They also suggest that prescriptive systems of rules
might differ from normative systems (although they do
not prove this - see Baron 1990). But they do not imply
that simpler rules are more adequate as normative stan-
dards than full consequentialist analyses.
Moreover, some decisions are so important that the
cost of thorough thinking and discussion pales by compar-
ison to the cost of erroneous choices. I have in mind issues
such as global environmental policy, fairness toward the
world's poor, trade policy, and medical policy. In these
matters, the thinking is often done by groups of people
engaged in serious debate, not by individuals. Thus,
there is more protection from error, and the effort is more
likely to pay off. Many have suggested that utilitarianism
and consequentialism are fully consistent with common
sense or everyday moral intuition (e.g., Sidgwick 1907),
but this may be more true in interpersonal relations than
in thinking about major social decisions.
Finally, the cost of thinking (or the cost of learning) may
be a good reason for learning a more adequate rule, but
not a good reason for having high confidence in the
inadequate rules that are used instead. Yet many exam-
ples of the use of nonconsequentialist rules are charac-
terized by exactly such confidence, to the point of resist-
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
ing counterarguments (e.g., Baron & Ritov 1993). In
some cases it might be best not to replace the nonconse-
quentialist rules with more carefully crafted ones but,
rather, to be less confident about them and more willing
to examine the situation from scratch. The carefully
crafted rules might be too difficult to learn. In such cases
we might say that overgeneralization is a matter of exces-
sive rigidity in the application of good general rules rather
than in the use of excessively general rules.
In this section, I have tried to give a plausible account of
how erroneous intuitions arise in the development of
individuals and cultures. Direct evidence on such devel-
opment is needed. In the rest of this article, I explore
some implications of my view for research and applica-
tion. These implications depend in different ways on the
probability that this view is correct. Some require only
that it is possible.
5. Intuition as a philosophical method
If intuitions about decision rules result from overgeneral-
ization, then (as also argued by Hare 1981 and Singer
1981) these intuitions are suspect as the basic data for
philosophical inquiry. Philosophers who argue that the
act-omission distinction is relevant (e.g., Kamm 1986;
Malm 1989) typically appeal directly to their own intu-
itions about cases. Unless it can be shown that intuitions
are trustworthy, these philosophers are simply begging
the question.
Rawls (1971) admits that single intuitions can be sus-
pect, but he argues for a reflective equilibrium based on
an attempt to systematize intuitions into a coherent the-
ory. Such systematization need not solve the problem,
however. For example, it might (although it does not do so
for Rawls) lead to a moral system in which the act-
omission distinction is central, a system in which morality
consists mainly of prohibitions and positive duties play a
limited role, if any (as suggested by Baron 1986).
Rawls's argument depends to some extent on an anal-
ogy between moral inquiry and fields such as modern
linguistics, where systematization of intuition has been a
powerful and successful method. The same method ar-
guably underlies logic and mathematics (Popper 1962,
Ch. 9). I cannot refute fully this analogical argument, but
it is not decisive, only suggestive. I have suggested (along
with Singer 1981) that morality and decision rules have an
external purpose through which they may be understood,
and that this criterion, rather than intuition, can be used
as the basis of justification. Perhaps this idea can be
extended by analogy to language, logic, and mathematics,
but that is not my task here.
6. Experimental methodology
Experiments on decision biases often use between-
subject designs (each condition given to different sub-
jects) or other means to make sure that subjects do not
compare directly the cases the experimenter will com-
pare (such as separating the cases within a long series).
The assumption behind such between-subject designs is
that subjects would not show a bias if they knew what
cases were being compared. All of the biases I have
described above are within-subject. Subjects show the

omission bias knowingly, for example, even when the act
and omission versions are adjacent.
In between-subject designs, subjects may display bi-
ases that they would themselves judge to be biases. Such
inconsistency seems to dispense with the need for a
normative theory such as the consequentialist theory I
have proposed, or expected utility theory. But without an
independent check, we do not know that subjects would
consider their responses to be inconsistent. Frisch (1993)
took the trouble to ask subjects whether they regarded
the two critical situations as equivalent - such as buying
versus selling as ways of evaluating a good - and she found
that they often did not. In other words, between-subject
designs are not necessary to find many of the classic biases
(including the status-quo effect described earlier), and
subjects often disagree with experimenters regarding
which situations are equivalent.
When we use within-subject designs, however, we
cannot simply claim that subjects are making mistakes
because they are violating the rules they endorse. When
asked for justifications for their judgments, subjects in all
the experiments I described earlier endorsed a variety of
rules that are consistent with their responses. We there-
fore need a normative theory, such as the consequentialist
theory I have outlined, if we are to evaluate subjects'
responses.
Much the same normative theory seems to be implicit
in most of the literature on framing effects and inconsis-
tencies. Whether or not a factor is relevant to making a
decision is a normative question, to which alternative
answers can be given. For example, Schick (1991) argues
that the way decision makers describe situations to them-
selves is normatively relevant to the decision they ought
to make (even, presumably, if these descriptions do not
affect consequences), because descriptions affect their
"understanding" of the situation, and understandings
are necessarily part of any account of decision making.
Hence, framing effects do not imply error. If consequen-
tialism is correct, though, Schick is wrong: consequential-
ism implies that understandings themselves can be erro-
neous (we might say). The attempt to bring in a
consequentialist standard through the back door while
ostensibly talking about inconsistency (Davves 1988) and
framing effects will not work. The standard should be
brought in explicitly, as I have tried to do.
In sum, although between-subject designs are useful
for studying heuristics, we may also use within-subject
designs to evaluate subjects' rules against a normative
standard such as consequentialism.
7. Policy implications
The examples I used to illustrate my argument are of
some relevance to issues of public concern, as noted. I am
tempted to offer evidence of psychological biases as am-
munition in various battles over public policy. Tetlock and
Mitchell (1993), however, correctly warn us against using
psychological research as a club for beating down our
political opponents. It is too easy, and it can usually be
done by both sides. On the other hand, a major reason for
studying biases is to discover where decisions need im-
provement, and if we researchers are going to reject all
application to public or personal decision making, we
Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
might as well fold up our tents and move on to more useful
activities. How should we draw the line between making
too many claims and too few?
I do not propose to answer this question fully, but part
of an answer concerns the way we make claims concerning
public policy debates. I suggest that claims of biased
reasoning be directed at particular arguments made by
one side or the other, not at positions, and certainly not at
individuals.
For example, one of the arguments against free-trade
agreements is that it is wrong to hurt some people (e.g.,
those on both sides who will lose their jobs to foreign
competition) to help others (e.g., those who will be
prevented from losing their jobs because their products
will be exported). This could be an example of omission
bias, or the do-no-harm heuristic, which operates in
much clearer cases and which, I have argued, is indeed an
error in these clear cases. Now real trade negotiations are
extremely complex, and they involve other issues charac-
teristic of any negotiations, such as trying to get the best
deal for everyone. So at most we could conclude that a
particular part of the argument against free trade is a
fallacy that has been found elsewhere in the laboratory.
This does not imply that the other arguments opposing
free trade are wrong or not decisive, or that the people
who oppose free trade are any more subject to error than
those who favor it.
With this kind of caution at least, the general program
of research can be extended more broadly to other mat-
ters of policy that I have not discussed here, such as
fairness in testing and selection for academic and employ-
ment opportunities, abortion, euthanasia, nationalism,
the morality of sex, and so on. In all these kinds of cases,
arguments for two (or more) sides are complex, but some
of the arguments are probably erroneous. Psychology has
a role to play in discovering fallacious arguments and
pointing them out.
One discipline has concerned itself with exactly this
kind of inquiry, the study of informal logic (e.g., Arnauld
1964; Johnson & Blair 19983; Walton 1989). This field,
however, has not incorporated many of the advances in
normative theory that have occurred since the time of
Aristotle, and it has paid no attention to psychological
evidence - sparse as it is - about which fallacies actually
occur in rea.1 life.
8. Educational implications
If discoveries about nonconsequentialist decision making
are themselves to have any consequences, they must
influence the thinking that people do. As I suggested at
the outset, norms for thinking are enforced throughout
society, so new research can influence these norms in
many ways. One may argue that psychological research
on racial and ethnic stereotyping (and authoritarianism,
ethnocentrism, dogmatism, etc.) has influenced Western
cultures in a great variety of ways. The claim that an
argument is prejudiced now refers to a well-established
body of psychological literature familiar to most people in
these societies. (In using this as an example, I am not
assuming that the research in question is flawless. In-
deed, Tetlock and Mitchell point out that much of this
research is itself politically biased, and the example may
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1 9
Commentary /Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
stand as a warning against excess as much as a model of
influence.)
Much of the influence that this sort of scholarship
exerts is very general. Scholars write articles, which are
read by students, who acquire beliefs that they then teach
to their children. Scholars also teach their students. Trade
books and magazines convey ideas to the general public.
But education provides a special channel for standards of
thinking and decision making to be transmitted, because
the transmission of such standards has long been a self-
conscious goal of education.
A natural question, then, is how to conduct education
in consequentialist decision making, assuming that we
acquire increasing confidence in our assessment of what
errors need to be corrected. Can we teach students that
there is a right way of making decisions, and it is conse-
quentialism? Here are two sides:
On the pro side, it is difficult to convey a standard that
you do not apply yourself. If, for example, we want to
teach students to write grammatically, or to avoid logical
errors, we must try to practice what we preach and apply
the standards when we evaluate students, each other, and
ourselves. Thus, when students hand in papers with
dangling participles or ad hominem arguments, we must
point this out with red pencils. Likewise, when students
provide nonconsequentialist arguments, we must point
this out, too, if we want students to become aware of this
issue. And we must give students opportunities to think
about decisions in places where the standards of decision
making can be discussed and brought to bear (Baron &
Brown 1991).
On the con side, decision making is not like grammar.
People have deep commitments to their decision rules,
and they oion these commitments. They may regard
attempts to change their views as a kind of theft. It is
certainly a hurt. Moreover, no matter how confident we
are in the normative theory, we can never be fully confi-
dent about prescriptive theory. Perhaps it is better that
some people not try to understand consequentialist the-
ory, even assuming its correctness. And we must remem-
ber that normative theory itself will evolve over time, so
that we can give people at most a best guess (and it is very
likely to be one that is nowhere near universally ac-
cepted). These considerations argue for a different kind of
instruction, one in which we present arguments as argu-
ments rather than as standards - not in red pencil but in
black pencil, as if to say: "This is just an argument on the
other side that you should consider." This view is compat-
ible with most approaches to moral education, in which
the emphasis is on discussion and argumentation rather
than on learning.
A moderate position between these two (Baron 1990) is
to present consequentialist theory as something that
students should know but do not have to accept or follow.
Thus, students should be able to apply the theory when
asked to do so, although they need not endorse what they
write as their own opinions. Alternative theories could be
taught as well; and discussion like that suggested in the
last paragraph is also compatible with this kind of
instruction.
One relevant finding of Baron and Ritov (1993) is that
a large fraction of our college-student subjects said they
had never heard of the argument that punishment was
justified by deterrence rather than retribution. Of those
10 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
who said that they heard it for the first time in our study,
some accepted it and some rejected it, and a similar
division was found among those who recognized the
argument as familiar. I suggest that not recognizing this
argument is evidence of an educational gap, and that this
particular gap is a worse one than that shown by the copy
editor who asks for Aristotle's first name.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Jean Beattie, Deborah Frisch, Richard Hare, Barbara
Mellers, liana Ritov, Mark Spranca, and several anonymous
reviewers for helpful comments. Much of the research de-
scribed was supported by National Science Foundation giants
SES-8809299 and SES-9109763.
Open Peer Commentary
Commentary submitted by the qualified professional readership of this
journal will be considered for publication in a later issue as Continuing
Commentary on this article. Integrative overviews and syntheses are
especially encouraged.
Fairness to policies, distinctions and
intuitions
Jonathan E. Adler
Department of Philosophy, Brooklyn College, City University of New York,
Brooklyn, NY 11210
Electronic mail: jea@bklyn.bitnet
1. Baron opposes the acts-omission distinction. Defenses of this
distinction usually depend on "intuitions" he believes arise from
overgeneralization. The choice of "overgeneralization" as a de-
scription has, I believe, two implications: first, that the general-
ization makes a truth-claim that does not hold over the entire
range of the rule's application; and second, that we would be
better off without the ouergeneralized rule.
Yet when real cases confront us in everyday life, a number of
factors contribute to the greater stringency in avoiding doing
harm than in failing to do what will lessen harm. Besides
differences in intention, these include differences in certainty
and responsibility. It can be argued (though not here) that these
differences are relevant to the distinction. But even if we avoid
arguing that claim, we can recognize that it may be the best
policy to draw and conform to this distinction, though not
absolutely, especially when we have good reason to believe that
if one treats each case as deserving of case-by-case assessment,
one may do much worse. If we then view the reasoning in the
cases Baron cites not as realizing an overgeneralized rule but as
the adoption of a policy, then, first, no truth-claim is being made
over the entire range of the policy, and second, we could be
better off maintaining the policy than switching to a more
accurate set of rules, even conceding the imperfections. (In
section 4, "The sources of intuition," Baron touches on this line
of objection, but I find his response too dismissive.)
Describing subjects' reasoning as the application of over-
generalized rules comes naturally when we focus on the specific
case, for that focus biases us toward evaluating subjects on the
basis of the single case alone, rather than taking the perspective
of the constrained decision or policy maker who attempts to
simplify by assimilating, as much as possible, new cases to old.
The need for cognitive economy is fundamental to the tradition
that informs much of the rest of Baron's research.

Baron sets aside considerations of planning and economies at
other places. For example, he writes that "the crucial element in
understanding is keeping the justification of the formula in
mind, in terms of the purposes served and the arguments for
why the formula serves that purpose." But if the justification
serves no foreseeable purpose, would I not be wise to allow
myself to forget it, perhaps storing it away in an accessible
location? A final example: in the discussion of compensation,
Baron writes that "subjects judge that more compensation
should be provided by a third party when an injury is caused by
human beings than when it is caused by nature." But surely if
one is designing a general plan for compensation and knows that
only some of the unjustified injuries can be compensated, it is
sensible to extend greater tolerance to those that are more a
matter of chance than those that are the outcomes of human
choice and hence responsibility.
Mine is not an approach that seeks to excuse or rationalize the
faults in subjects' reasoning and judgment. Evaluation or criti-
cism should be more complex because in subjects' understand-
ing of these tasks multiple ends (or goals) meet. (On these
matters and in disagreement with Flinders [1987] more opti-
mistic view, see Adler [1991].) The assumption that there can be
alternative purposes (or understandings) of these tasks does not
imply, as Baron claims against Schick (1991), that each of these
alternatives is proper, only that some are.
2. In rejecting the acts-omission distinction, Baron does not
tell us how we would handle difficult cases. Specifically, there is
the pair of cases now known as the Trolley and the Transplant
(Thomson 1990). In the former, a runaway trolley, if allowed to
continue, will kill five, but a person can pull a switch to divert it
to another track where it kills only one. In the transplant case,
five otherwise healthy individuals need just one of the organs
from a loner who wanders into the hospital. We judge it right to
switch the trolley and wrong to take the organs. Does Baron
accept this judgment, and if so, how does he account for it on his
simple consequentialist model? (He defines consequentialism
in terms of goals, rather than causal independence [of the act
from the consequences]. But if so, why could "not intending to
bring about unwarranted harm " not be a goal?)
3. To treat intuitions as overgeneralizations and in conflict is to
misrepresent how philosophers understand the notion of intu-
ition. As with linguistic intuitions, these are not generalizations
from experience, and seeming conflicts in intuition show only
that either at least one is not a genuine intuition or that the
foundation of the enterprise is wrong. The linguistic analogy
shows something else: a theory, such as a theory of grammar, can
be testable, even when it specifies the source from which its own
confirming data are to be found. The theory can still be testable
if it can generate precise predictions and is broad enough to have
implications well beyond the range of data to which it has so far
appealed.
Baron claims that intuitions must be shown to be "trustwor-
thy, " but I think this demand is unwarranted. It suggests, first,
that we have a criterion that is neutral (with respect to compet-
ing theories) and independent (of intuitions) for the Tightness or
wrongness of a set of cases. The claim is not made good, and here
the parallel with linguistics holds. Second, though now the
parallel with linguistics fades, ethical intuitions do not represent
a single source or a natural kind. Depending on the cases,
different overlapping sets of beliefs and values inform our
intuitions. Those who rely on the method of intuitions are not
committed to a single intuitive "sense' that we could assess in a
general way for reliability. Third, even those who complain
about intuitions as prejudices (Hare 1981; Singer 1979) are quite
successful in appealing to them as support for their views.
We should be suspicious of many intuitive judgments and, in
particular, some of the examples meant to elicit them. Baron's
valuable research helps expose biases that explain why some
examples do not yield true intuitions. Let's not throw out the
baby with the bathwater.
Commentary/Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
Three reservations about consequentialism
Hal R. Arkes
Department of Psychology, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701-2979
Electronic mail: arkes@ouvaxa.cats.ohiou.edu
I would like to agree wholeheartedly with Baron's consequen-
tialist thesis that "the best decisions are those that yield the best
consequences for achieving people's goals. ' However, there are
three irksome issues that make me hesitate.
The first concerns the definition of consequences. Exactly
what should be included in reckoning consequences? Several
authors, such as Schmitt and Marwell (1972), Kahneman et al.
(1986), and Loewenstein et al. (1989) have shown that people
will forsake gains to themselves and even reject aggregate gains
to all players to achieve what is perceived to be a more equitable
distribution. For example, people might prefer a distribution
among three participants in which each person gets two assets to
a distribution in which one person gets five, one person gets
four, and one person gets three. People are willing to forgo
additional assets for everyone to equalize outcomes. Are such
people failing to follow the consequentialist norm? I believe so.
But what if the three people involved pointed out that jealousy
and even hostility would undoubtedly ensue if the unequal
distribution occurred? Such negative occurrences would sub-
stantially detract from its otherwise generous consequences.
This might actually render the equal but smaller distribution
superior.
My own preference would be not to honor jealousy and
pettiness in the calculation of consequences. If the goal is to
maximize benefits, then whining about unequal distributions
when everyone is better off seems counterproductive to me.
However, if counterproductive emotional reactions have serious
consequences, can we ignore them? If we do, we may invite
truly terrible consequences. If we do not ignore them, we
dignify and perpetuate their influence. What is a consequential-
ist to do?
The second annoying issue can be illustrated by referring to
an example alluded to by Lichtenstein et al. (1990). Several
years ago a young girl named Jessica fell down an abandoned
well in Texas. The enormous amount of money spent to rescue
her could have been used instead to cap lots of abandoned wells
in Texas, thereby preventing the deaths of many children in
future years. (Several children die each year in Texas after falling
down such wells.) Should we have ignored Jessica's cries in order
to spend the money in a more effective way, that is, according to
consequentialist norms?
There are some possible escape hatches for a consequential-
ist. For example, saving an identifiable life might have positive
consequences that would not be obtained if multiple potential
lives were saved. Nevertheless, saving Jessica was preferred to a
course of action (capping many wells) that would probably have
saved more than one life. Did this therefore violate the conse-
quentialist norm? Probably. But I would not have volunteered to
defend the consequentialist norm to the citizenry of Texas at that
time.
The third issue is one that has been raised by critics of
utilitarianism (Williams 1973). Suppose I promise my dying
friend that I will use the assets in his estate to fulfill his last
request. Keeping this promise might be seen as a behavior
having prima facie Tightness. But what if I can achieve a much
better consequence by breaking my promise? My reputation
would not suffer, because I am the only one aware of my
promise. However, my integrity is at stake. What amount of
"achievement of people's goals" am I willing to sacrifice to
preserve my integrity? Does a consequentialist norm require
that the answer be "none"?
Philosophers have long debated the issue of what is good and
what is right (Ross 1930). Consequentialism generally favors the
former. Obligation, integrity, and honesty may sometimes favor
the latter.
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1 11
Commentary/Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
Baron may object that my three reservations about the conse-
quentialist norm represent tiny chinks in what is otherwise a
solid structure. The participants in his ingenious experiments
did not cite the wisdom of John Stuart Mill when they objected
to coercion. Similarly, my reservations might represent prob-
lems with the consequentialist norm that most people are not
going to mention. Many people will countenance the deaths of
10 children who are not vaccinated to avoid the deaths of 5
children who are allergic to the vaccine, but in so doing they will
not say that they have rejected the consequentialist norm
because of the problems I have enumerated. They are more
likely to reject it for the inadequate reason Baron suggests, that
is, overgeneralization of other rules.
In fact, I have witnessed plenty of nonconsequentialist behav-
ior that does not seem to be related to the three issues I have
raised. For example, some of the supporters of the immensely
expensive space station have said recently that no matter how
questionable its scientific merit, we ought to continue funding
it, because we have already spent so much on it.
I conclude that whatever the deficiencies of the consequen-
tialist norm may be, it is less deficient than the thinking
exhibited by people, both in and out of Baron's experiments.
Inappropriate judgements: Slips, mistakes or
violations?
Peter Aytona and Nigel Harvey"
"Psychology Department, City University, London EC1VOHB, United
Kingdom and "Department of Psychology, University College London,
London WC1E6BT, United Kingdom
Electronic mail: p.ayton@city.ac.uk
Because it is cognitively taxing to make judgements by applying
strictly rational methods, people may use decision rules akin to
Keynes's (1936) judgement conventions or Tversky and Kahne-
man's (1974) heuristics. The cause of nonconsequential reason-
ing, Baron argues, is overgeneralising such heuristics. This
argument is at once rather curious; heuristics are simple rules of
thumb that inevitably generalise to some degree or other.
Overgeneralisation suggests that there is some more reasonable
level of generalisation that people are exceeding. Simple heuris-
tics that never made errors would be very valuable, but are they
possible? We suspect that relatively simple rules will only be
perfectly effective in relatively simple environments.
To estimate the efficiency of the heuristics we may use to
perform judgements we need to know something of the natural
ecology of the environment in which the heuristics are applied.
How often will the heuristics work? How often will they fail?
How bad will the (consequences of) failures be? What are the
costs and benefits of alternative strategies? These questions are
not answered by the research cited in the target article. Indeed,
given the ingenuity required to devise problems that demon-
strate nonconsequential reasoning, it could be argued that such
heuristics may actually be rather good at their job.
Following Reason et al. (1991), incorrect behaviour can be
attributed to slips, mistakes, and violations. Slips occur when
people have the right objectives but fail to reach them because of
the intrusion of some strong habits over which they have no
control. When people receive feedback about the outcomes of
their judgements, they know they were inappropriate. Al-
though Baron claims that his within-subjects experiments pre-
clude the possibility that his subjects are inadvertently breaking
rules they actually endorse, he also finds that subjects presented
with a Golden Rule argument will revise their judgements,
thereby eliminating bias. They therefore seem to be making
slips; their attempts to reach their objectives have been dis-
rupted by a strong habitual form of reasoning. Given their lack of
control over their reasoning, they are no more to blame for its
12 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
results than a car driver having a heart attack is to blame for the
ensuing crash.
Shafir and Tversky (1992) showed that people will use norma-
tive principles when they are salient or "transparent" in prob-
lems, but when they are not, people are more likely to reason
nonconsequentially. Shafir and Tversky point out that although
most subjects make the wrong choices of cards to turn in Wason's
(1966) selection task, they can easily appreciate the relevance of
the possible outcomes of their choices. In our experience,
subjects who are wrong often stridently insist that they are right
for reasons that plainly satisfy them, yet these subjects will
(more quietly) appreciate the correct argument.
Mistakes occur when people have an inappropriate objective
for meeting their goal, however that inappropriate objective is
met. They have done what they wanted to do but, in terms of
achieving their goal, they have done the wrong thing. Perhaps
these are the subjects who rejected the notion that punishment
is justified by deterrence rather than retribution and perhaps
they are suffering from an "educational gap." Given their more
intentional nature, moral mistakes appear more blameworthy
than moral slips, though some would claim that ignorance or
lack of intelligence is not evidence for irrationality (e.g., Cohen
1981). To this extent, ignorance of the law is an excuse.
People may also behave in a way that they know will not meet
their objectives. They may do so to explore the relationship
between objectives and goals. In such cases short-term viola-
tions may lead to improved performance in the long run because
of the extra knowledge revealed. It is difficult to interpret this
rather existentialist approach to moral judgement as blamewor-
thy. Self-conscious violations can be found in Baron's (1992)
evidence of dissociations between "should" and "would" in
people's reactions to hypothetical scenarios. A proportion of
subjects recognised that they should shoot 1 innocent person in
order to save 38 but conceded that they would not do so.
We agree that people probably do not always reason critically
in order to make moral judgements. Indeed, we wonder
whether it is universally recognised that moral reasoning should
inform moral choices. We suspect that people will commonly
appeal to authority rather than reason. Political and religious
ideology may often serve as decision support systems for a range
of judgements concerning morality. This seems exemplified by
the recent rather startling advice offered by the British prime
minister that, with respect to criminal behaviour, "society needs
to condemn a little more and understand a little less." When
considering the interpretation of the merits of the choices made
by subjects in experimental tests of moral decision making,
however, it may be appropriate to be cautious with condemna-
tion until we understand a little more.
Do, or should, all human decisions conform
to the norms of a consumer-oriented
culture?
L. Jonathan Cohen
The Queen's College, Oxford University, Oxford 0X1 4AW, England
Electronic mail: ljcohen@vax.oxford.ac.uk
Baron's hypothesis in the earlier part of his target article is that
we should make decisions according to our judgements of their
consequences for the achievement of our goals, and that when
nonconsequentialist principles of decision making are used,
they are biases and arise from the overgeneralisation of rules
that are consistent with the requirements of consequentialism
when applied only to a limited set of cases. At heart, therefore,
holds Baron, we are all consequentialists. There are, however,
three major difficulties with this argument.
The first is that it does not exclude the feasibility of exploiting
overgeneralisation in another direction. Consider, for example,

a culture dominated by conservatism, in which conformity with
the status quo is the most important criterion for a person's
selecting one proposed pattern of behaviour over another. In
such a culture intervention in existing social or natural processes
is normally to be avoided. Traditional patterns of medication, for
example, are quite acceptable, and the rule to preserve human
life is thus valid within a limited range of application. Neverthe-
less that rule may be unacceptable if applied too widely, as in
desiring the use of ultramodern ventilation machinery when
there is no prospect of the patient's recovery. From the conser-
vative's point of view such an overgeneralisation of the role
would generate a consequentialist bias. It follows that further
empirical research is needed to determine whether we are
indeed consequentialists at heart, with an occasional over-
generalising bias toward conservatism or some other nonconse-
quentialist principle, or conservatives (or something else), with
an occasional overgeneralising bias toward consequentialism (or
whatever). In other words, if Barons hypothesis about biases
arising from overgeneralisation is to be taken seriously, he has to
describe some experimental method of demonstrating that the
principle against which such overgeneralisation operates is
always consequentialist.
It may be tempting for someone to claim that empirical
evidence is not needed here, because consequentialism is in a
conceptually privileged position. Necessarily, one might say, we
all want to achieve our various goals, whether these be the
maximisation of one's own pleasure or of someone else's plea-
sures, or the continuance of existing patterns of behaviour, or
whatever. But this way out of the difficulty is not open to anyone
who wants, as Baron does, to be able to contrast, as appropriate,
behaviour conforming to the norm of goal-achievement and
behaviour exhibiting this or that particular bias. If such biases
can occur, it cannot be necessarily true that every principle
for decision making is motivated by a desire for goal achieve-
ment.
A second major difficulty with Baron's hypothesis must now
be considered. Why do we have to assume, in conducting
empirical research on the issue, that whatever norm is dominant
in one community is also dominant in another? From the fact
that somewhere in the United States or Europe most subjects in
a group of sophomores, clinicians, judges, or legislators have a
certain preference we cannot infer that "most people," that is,
most people in the world, have that preference also. Conse-
quentialism, with its consumer-oriented culture, may be much
more common in some parts of the world than in others.
Elsewhere, perhaps, cross-cultural investigations that were
sufficiently thorough would reveal a preference for a conserva-
tive ethic over a consequentialist one, or for conformity to a
supposedly revealed religious ethic over the permissiveness of
secular tolerance. And, far from its being the case that the ideal
for all people is to be able to achieve all their desires all the time,
there are Buddhists whose ideal is to have no desires of any kind.
Nor are individuals necessarily single-minded in their choice of
norms, always allowing consequentialism, say, or conservatism
to dominate their decision making. Many people are pluralists
instead, allowing first one set of cultural values to dominate,
then another - perhaps as a result of the complex patterns of
migration and intermixture that the accidents of human history
have produced in human society.
A third major difficulty with Baron's hypothesis is now appar-
ent. If a pluralist account of the norms involved in decision
making is correct from a descriptive point of view, it will
inevitably also affect investigators' normative judgements about
decision making. Specifically, if two investigators do not share
exactly the same system of norms, what one of them takes to be a
bias in a subject's decision making, the other may take to be a
valid principle. And the situation is thus analogous to that which
prevails (Cohen 1985; Gigerenzer 1993) in regard to so-called
cognitive biases. Subjects' responses to certain judgemental
tasks are interpreted by some investigators as exhibiting persis-
Commentary /Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
tent patterns of error or irrationality, whereas other investiga-
tors interpret the responses differently and fail to find these
patterns of error or irrationality. If it could be safely assumed
that everyone attached precisely the same meanings to ques-
tions about the validity or probability of particular judgements,
then biases could be reliably diagnosed wherever such ques-
tions were systematically given the wrong answers. But in fact
that assumption cannot safely be made, any more than we can
safely assume that everyone thinks the same values are relevant
to all questions about particular decisions. Just as one can
measure quantities of apples by number, weight, or volume, so,
too, there are radically different ways of measuring probabilities
or evaluating decisions. It may therefore be doubted, pace
Baron, whether the study of so-called biases can in fact give
much help to decision makers in public life. Indeed, negotia-
tions may well proceed better through the identification of
common interests from which to reason, and of opposing inter-
ests to be respected, than through attempts to convict others of
fallacies in their reasoning.
Correct decisions and their good
consequences
Steven Daniel
Department of Philosophy, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850
Electronic mall: sgd3@crux1.cit.cornell.edu
Baron argues for a normative model of decision making that is
consequentialist because it holds that "the best decisions are
those that yield the best consequences for achieving people's
goals." He says little about how to assess the goodness of
consequences, and people will often disagree about which
consequences of a decision are best (e.g., when evaluating them
against competing goals). This will often be the case even if we
are all trying to maximize some particular good, such as the
quantity of happiness or pleasure our decisions produce. Still,
assuming that these disagreements are resolvable in principle, I
think Baron is right that a normatively correct decision proce-
dure will have better consequences than a normatively incorrect
one. There may be particular instances in which this fails to
hold, where reasoning poorly might by accident have better
consequences than reasoning well; but such cases will be
exceptional.
What I find puzzling is the suggestion, implicit throughout
Baron's target article, that these ideas are inconsistent with
nonconsequentialist - or what we might call "deontological" -
theories of decision making. Baron leaves one with the impres-
sion that the nonconsequentialist denies that consequences are
in any way relevant to determining the normative correctness of
actions or decision rules. Surely this is not so. If it were, it is hard
to see why we should take nonconsequentialism seriously. If
following normatively correct decision rules were likely to have
bad consequences, it is hard to see why we should care about
normative correctness itself.
As I understand nonconsequentialists, they do not claim that
the consequences of a decision rule are irrelevant to whether we
should follow it or that they should in no way figure in our
evaluation of it. What they deny is that a rule's having the best
overall consequences is constitutive of its correctness. When
they point to the consequences of a decision rule in the course of
evaluating it, it is on the assumption that acting on a normatively
correct rule will, as a matter of fact, yield the best consequences.
So, nonconsequentialists take consequences to be relevant to
decision making; but these do not, in their view, constitute the
correctness of norms. If this is the proper way to understand
nonconsequentialists, they simply hold that it is not a necessary
truth that normatively correct decision procedures will have the
best consequences overall. To them it appears at least logically
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1 13
CommentarylBaron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
possible that by acting in accordance with normatively correct
rules we might bring about consequences that are suboptimal,
or even disastrous.
An example: suppose I follow a set of decision rules I believe
to be normatively correct in the nonconsequentialist or deon-
tological sense. Surely a Cartesian evil demon could ensure
that my following these rules would have bad consequences, and
we would not view him as transferring the normative correct-
ness of one set of rules to another. Our original rules would
remain normatively correct in spite of their bad consequences.
Our acting upon rules that are normatively incorrect will in this
case yield the best consequences; but this, the nonconsequen-
tialist will insist, is at least within the realm of logical possi-
bility.
Baron might argue that there is something objectionable
about the nonconsequentialist's use of this example. Perhaps
there is; nevertheless it makes nonconsequentialism appear far
more plausible than Baron's target article does. Baron does not
paint a clear picture of his opposition.
Furthermore, if my characterization of nonconsequentialists
is correct, they could easily accommodate the fact that subjects
who take themselves to be conforming to normatively correct
decision rules make decisions that are inconsistent and erro-
neous in various ways. Nonconsequentialists would simply
stress that it is very hard to show that the decision rules isolated
in these experiments are erroneous in the consequentialist
sense, it being so difficult to assess their long-term conse-
quences. And should they be erroneous in this sense, nonconse-
quentialists are then perfectly free to endorse or condemn those
decision rules on the basis of their consequences; their bad
consequences will simply not be believed to constitute their
incorrectness.
Why should the nonconsequentialist believe that good deci-
sions will generally yield good consequences if this is not a
necessary truth? Well, it is hard to see how any decision
procedure people actually use on a large scale can fail to be
justified from a consequentialist point of view. Otherwise, we
would have perished long ago. This point is emphasized by those
who hold that the rules we currently follow might confer some
selective advantage, but Baron finds this claim suspect. He
points out that a rule might "engender its own survival" without
having a consequentialist justification.
However, we cannot say that a rule has an evolutionary basis,
or that it confers a selective advantage, simply because it
engenders its own survival. It will have an evolutionary basis
only if it engenders our survival, and it will accomplish this only
if it has a consequentialist justification (or perhaps its engender-
ing our survival would then be its consequentialist justification).
We might not be able to say what kind of selective advantage
these rules confer; but we have been given no reason to believe
they confer none.
Finally, a point about methodology. Baron argues that a
nonconsequentialist theory of decision making will depend too
strongly on our normative intuitions, when "intuitions about
decision rules . . . are suspect as the basic data for philosophical
inquiry." That may be, but then Baron is just as badly off as the
nonconsequentialist. Consequentialism relies just as heavily on
our intuitions about the goodness of various consequences as
deontology relies on our intuitions about the Tightness of various
rules. It does not offer us an Archimedean point from which to
theorize about reasoning and decision making. The good news is
that we do not need one.
14 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
Why care where moral intuitions come from?
Susan Dwyer
Department of Philosophy, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
H3A2T7
Electronic mail: sue@philo.mcgill.ca
We all have strong, nonconsequentialist moral intuitions (here-
after, NCMIs), which Baron suggests we would be better off
without. Here I want to take up the issue of the alleged
problematicity, not just of NCMIs, but of moral intuitions in
general, for ethical theory. This focus will, I think, also show that
Baron's project is self-defeating. His argument for the epis-
temologically suspect nature of NCMIs generalizes to any type
of moral intuition. Thus, if he is successful, Baron has given us
reason to reject his oiun view, because it is clearly driven by
consequentialist intuitions.
About moral intuitions we might ask two questions. One is
psychological or sociological: Where do they come from? The
other is epistemological: What role, if any, should they play in
moral theory? These questions are related, but Baron is not
sensitive enough to the ways in which they are actually con-
nected in contemporary moral philosophy. Answers to the first
question might constrain what count as correct answers to the
second. Thus, imagine that our moral intuitions are beliefs
implanted by evil Martians. If we took moral intuitions as
epistemological bedrock, we would be wrong to set much store
by any moral theory constructed on the basis of such implanted
intuitions. Yet it is clear that no (living) moral philosopher who
invokes intuitions with any degree of seriousness takes them to
have this foundational status (cf. Moore 1903; Rawls 1971;
Thomson 1986; 1990). My point is this: insofar as moral philoso-
phers appeal to moral intuitions in assessing moral principles,
and insofar as the enterprise of theory construction in ethics is
(in part) one of systematizing our moral intuitions, it is certainly
of interest where moral intuitions come from. But the degree to
which the source of moral intuitions matters will depend on
one's answer to the epistemological question. If one holds, as
Rawls and many others do, that moral intuitions and moral
theory are mutually revisable, that theory ought never be held
wholly hostage to intuitions, then one will not be put off by
Barons assertion that some moral intuitions have a less than
respectable etiology. Indeed, the very point of the strategy of
reflective equilibrium is to provide the theorist with a principled
means of rejecting some intuitions. Moral intuitions are not
sacrosanct to anyone except the moral dogmatist. It does not
follow from this that philosophers who invest moral intuitions
with substantially less weight, that is, those who use them as
starting points in the process of reflective equilibrium, can
afford to ignore the question of their origin. And perhaps Baron
has shown that the etiology of NCMIs in particular is so undis-
tinguished that moral philosophers should set no store by them
at all.
So far as I can see, Baron's conclusion that NCMIs are nothing
more than irrational biases is not warranted on the basis of
the empirical evidence alone. What Baron's experiments con-
firm is what most of us knew all along, namely, that human
beings use consequentialist and nonconsequentialist decision
rules. Rather, whatever plausibility his claim has derives from
his speculation that NCMIs are the result of unreflective adher-
ence to childhood admonitions (which were themselves hastily
given by our caretakers), or are perverted overgeneralizations of
consequentialist considerations. Hence, the problematicity of
NCMIs depends on their having this sort of etiology. But Baron
gives us no reason to think that such intuitions are unique in this
respect. If the social and psychological processes responsible for
the formation of NCMIs are as robust as Baron seems to think, it
is equally plausible to argue that we arrive at some of our
consequentialist intuitions in the same way. Baron would appear
to face a dilemma: either all moral intuitions have the same
(problematic) source, in which case his own consequentialist

ones are to be doubted, or there is nothing peculiar or irrational
about NCMIs, and our current practice of moral reasoning does
not need the revisions to which he points. Indeed, it seems to
me that Baron's studies, far from encouraging us to dispense
with deontological reasoning, actually reveal the deep-seated
nature of our nonconsequentialist commitments. To ignore
these is to fail to take seriously the depth and complexity of our
moral sensibilities. Their origin might be suspect, and we might
find ourselves rejecting some of them. But given the relatively
primitive stage of our scientific inquiry into morality, we need to
hang on to all the data we can.
Baron has thrown down a gauntlet that moral psychologists
ought to pick up. He is surely right to reject various teleological
accounts of the origins of NCMIs, and I agree that philosophers
have not provided any "deep theory" of "where . . . decision
rules come from." But I think there is a story to be told about the
source of moral intuitions that certainly makes less problematic,
and perhaps renders essential, a central role for them in the
construction and revision of moral theory. This story requires
taking the so-called linguistic analogy very seriously, pressing it
far beyond Rawls's use of it in moral epistemology and into
substantive service in moral psychology. All moral agents have
moral intuitions; within cultural groups there is remarkable
convergence in these intuitions and they appear to arise in
agents on the basis of degenerate and partial input. These
phenomena are surely worth explaining, just as their linguistic
parallels are. And we have every reason to be optimistic that
agents' moral intuitions (their NCMIs included) will provide
insight into the structure of human moral competence, just as
speakers' linguistic intuitions have shed light on the structure of
our linguistic competence.
Normative and descriptive consequentialism
Jonathan St. B. T. Evans
Department of Psychology, University of Plymouth, Plymouth PL4 8AA,
United Kingdom
Electronic mall: p02118@prime-a.plymouth.ac.uk
Baron's target article bears on the issue of rationality in human
reasoning. In the study of deduction, authors have had increas-
ing difficulty defending rationality by the traditional criterion of
logic (e.g., O'Brien 1993). However, several authors have sug-
gested recently that the rationality of inferences is better judged
on the basis of whether or not subjects are acting in such a way as
to achieve their goals (Evans 1993; Gigerenzer & Hug 1992;
Over & Manktelow 1993). Moreover, these authors have argued
that people are generally rational in this sense, despite their
manifest lack of logicality.
An important qualification to my own view of rationality is
that although people attempt to fulfil their goals, their success is
highly limited by a variety of cognitive constraints. This follows a
worthy tradition of "bounded rationality" proposed by Herb
Simon (e.g., Newell & Simon 1972) and followed by many
others, including the much maligned, in this context, Tversky
and Kahneman (see Kahneman et al. 1982, Preface). Thus, if
behaviour is not - in Baron's term - consequential, the first
question I would ask is, What cognitive constraints might we
identify to account for this?
In this approach - consequentialism as a descriptive theory -
we can account for error in human reasoning in two different
ways. First, we might argue that although subjects are being
illogical, their behaviour nevertheless serves their goals. For
example, if people have a goal of maintaining a coherent and
consistent set of beliefs, then some of the findings attributed to
confirmation or belief biases are easier to understand. When
subjects are manifestly not acting in such a way as to achieve
their goals - for instance, the goal of solving an artificial
Commentary /Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
reasoning problem in an experiment - we should look for
cognitive constraints, which in the case of deductive reasoning
arise from a range of linguistic and pragmatic factors (see Evans
et al. 1993).
Baron, however, uses consequentialism as a normative, not a
descriptive theory, from which he suggests systematic depar-
tures frequently occur. This, he argues, happens because peo-
ple follow rules, which may have been consequentialist when
originally induced, but which are overgeneralised and applied
where they do not produce a desirable outcome. Many apparent
examples of this are given in the target article. This part of the
argument is essentially behaviourist: people are the victims of
their past reinforcement history; their actions are not deter-
mined directly by thoughts about consequences. However,
Baron then proceeds to imply that people could be a lot more
rational if only they took the time and trouble to think before
acting.
What does Baron mean by rule following? A central heating
system may be said to be following rules when it turns itself on
and off at set times, or according to the ambient temperature of
the building. However, I doubt that this is what Baron means by
rule-governed behaviour in human beings. He means more than
that the behaviour can be described by rules: he implies that the
rules are internalised as the mechanisms responsible for behav-
iour. In fact, he goes beyond this and appears to believe that the
rules form a part of people's explicit knowledge. This is implied
by such comments as, "Why would anyone invent or modify a
rule and teach it to someone else?" or, "If the rule is badly stated,
one corrective mechanism is critical thought about the rule
itself."
I have some difficulty with this. It is one thing for people to be
biased by unconscious factors and implicit knowledge (see
Evans 1989) but another for them to behave irrationally on the
basis of explicitly held rules - accountable, as it were, to
conscious inspection. If people do this, then why not dispense
with the rules altogether, and think about the goals instead? In
fact - and this is the crunch - how can we be sure that people are
not acting in such a way as to achieve their goals when their
choices are, to Baron's mind, nonconsequential?
Is consequentialism sustainable as a normative theory, as
Baron would persuade us? As a model for rationality, the
proposal suffers from the well-recognised problem (at least since
Cohen 1981) of any externally imposed normative theory: the
subject's norms may not be those of the psychologist. For
example, Baron argues that retribution - as opposed to deter-
rence - is an irrational goal on which to base capital punishment.
But if retribution is a goal that people actually hold, then their
advocacy of the death penalty is consequential, and hence
rational from their point of view. In the United Kingdom, for
example, the death penalty was abolished many years ago, and
regular attempts to reintroduce it are voted down in parliament
by MPs who are unpersuaded by arguments of deterrence. A
majority of popular opinion, by contrast, continues to favour the
death penalty, encouraged by highly sensationalist and emotive
coverage of murder cases in the popular press, with great
emphasis on retribution. It may be easy to decide which group
you agree with, but is either to be deemed irrational, or
nonconsequential from their own perspective?
Similar arguments can be made about the other phenomena
discussed. Thus, Baron thinks it is irrational to prefer an inaction
that causes more deaths to an action that causes fewer. But if
people feel responsible for an action and feel much less responsi-
ble for an inaction, then their (peace of mind) goal is achieved by
the decisions they actually take. In short, although Baron is able
to argue morally that people do not act in such a way as to
achieve the goals that society deems desirable, it is much harder
to argue psychologically that people do not act in such a way as to
achieve their personal goals.
In conclusion, I believe that consequentialism as a descriptive
approach can help provide insight into the causes of error in
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1 15
Commentary /Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
human reasoning and judgement, but I am far from persuaded of
its utility as a normative theory in the way Baron proposes.
Moreover, I am unconvinced by his own descriptive theory,
which posits an unlikely combination of slavish, unthinking,
rule following with explicit awareness of these rules and the
ability to discard and rewrite them as a matter of conscious
choice.
Consequentialism and utility theory
Deborah Frisch
Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403
Electronic mail: dfrisch@oregon.uoregon.edu
In this target article, Baron provides a defense of consequential-
ism as a normative model of decision making and reports several
empirical studies demonstrating violations of the model. The
normative claim is that one's choice should be based on only the
anticipated consequences of different possible actions. The
descriptive claim is that there are conditions under which
people's choices are based on factors other than anticipated
consequences. I basically agree with these claims and shall
discuss some of their implications.
The studies described are part of a large body of research in
behavioral decision making demonstrating that people's choices
sometimes violate normative standards of rational decision mak-
ing. The normative standard Baron uses, consequentialism,
however, is slightly different from the normative standard most
commonly used, which is subjective expected utility theory
(Savage 1954). To see the difference between the two perspec-
tives it is useful to ask the question, "Do empirical phenomena
that violate expected utility theory also violate the normative
standard of consequentialism?"
Researchers have demonstrated a wide variety of empirical
phenomena that violate expected utility theory, including the
preference reversal phenomenon (Lichtenstein & Slovic 1971),
framing effects (Kahneman & Tversky 1984), the certainty effect
(Kahneman & Tversky 1979), and the sunk cost effect (Arkes &
Blumer 1985). One of the most striking violations of utility
theory is the framing effect, which demonstrates that the way a
situation is described or framed influences people's choices.
Although framing effects are a violation of utility theory, it is not
clear that they violate the standard of consequentialism. It
depends on how one defines "consequence."
How does one decide whether a factor such as framing should
be viewed as influencing the consequence of a decision? For
decisions that are made on behalf of other people (as many of
Baron's examples are), it is reasonable to claim that framing
should not be considered part of the consequence of the deci-
sion. However, for decisions made on behalf of oneself, the
answer is less clear. In that case, it seems plausible that framing
can influence the consequence (Kahneman & Tversky 1984). In
particular, framing might influence people's experience of the
outcome of a decision, in which case it seems reasonable to
include framing in the definition of consequences (Frisch &
Jones 1993). There is empirical evidence suggesting that under
certain conditions framing does influence people's experience of
the outcome of a decision (Levin & Gaeth 1988).
My analysis thus far suggests that some of the most serious
violations of utility theory may actually be consistent with
consequentialism. The more general point is that a shift from a
focus on utility theory as a normative standard to a focus on
consequentialism highlights the importance of specifying the
factors that are considered legitimate aspects of the conse-
quences of a decision. Although this question also comes up in
discussions of utility theory (see, for example, Machina 1989), I
think that the consequentialist argument developed in this
paper makes the difficulty and importance of the issue much
more salient.
16 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
Baron does not provide a solution to the problem of defining
"consequence." He does, however, imply that the solution to
this problem will not depend on intuition, because he says that
consequentialism eliminates the need for intuitions in norma-
tive theories. If one attempts to apply consequentialism to any
particular situation, however, it seems that it is still necessary to
rely on intuitions. For example, consider the issue of whether
abortion should be legal. Imagine a person who says, "It makes
me sick to think of abortions being performed in my city." This
person is saying that one consequence of legalized abortion is his
negative emotional experience. Should this type of conse-
quence be taken into account? What principles can we use to
determine the types of consequences that should be excluded
from an analysis? It seems that one needs to rely on intuitions
about the types of consequences that are legitimate. The point is
that even if one adopts a consequentialist perspective, one still
needs to rely on intuitions about what sorts of consequences to
include and how to weight the relative importance of different
types of consequences.
Thus far, I have contrasted Baron's normative standard of
consequentialism with the traditional normative model, utility
theory. It is also useful to contrast Baron's empirical methodol-
ogy with the methods typically used in behavioral decision
research. Much research involves a design in which a certain
factor (such as framing or response mode) is varied between
subjects and the responses of the two groups are compared. In
contrast, many of the studies described by Baron use a within-
subjects design. More important, in the research described,
subjects not only stated their preferences but were also asked to
explain their choices or to provide assessments of the desir-
ability of different outcomes. This methodology revealed strik-
ing examples of inconsistency, such as cases in which people's
choices were inconsistent with their own assessments of the
desirability of different outcomes.
The finding that people's choices might not reflect their
assessments of the desirability of different outcomes has several
disturbing implications. First, it raises the question, "Which
response (choice versus assessment of consequences) reflects
subjects' 'true preferences'?" That is, is one mode of response a
more valid measure of preferences than the other? Second, it
raises the issue of whether public policy should be based on
people's choices (i.e., the policies people vote for) or people's
assessments of the desirability of different consequences. To the
extent that these two measures diverge, it is very difficult to
arrive at a coherent policy.
In sum, I think Baron's target article raises several very
important questions. First, it highlights the importance of
specifying the factors involved in defining "consequences."
Second, it shows the difficulty of determining what people's true
preferences are. In particular, people's choices may not neces-
sarily reflect their preferences; if not, then future research will
need to specify the conditions under which choices do and do
not reflect preferences.
Is consequentialism better regarded as a
form of reasoning or as a pattern of
behavior?
Steve Fuller
Department of Communication, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
15260
Electronic mail: fuller@vms.cis.pitt.edu
I find Baron's research and policy orientation toward normative
consequentialism particularly congenial. A- big advance that
psychologists have made over philosophers in their studies of
rationality is to take seriously the difference between evaluating
and improving performance (Baron's "normative' vs. "prescrip-

tive" perspectives). I have pursued a line of inquiry similar to
Baron's with regard to reorienting normative philosophy of
science on the basis of psychological and sociological evidence
that traditional norms of scientific rationality have little basis in
scientific practice (Fuller 1993). My comments, then, are those
of a fellow traveler.
Consequentialism rests on the idea that norms can be ex-
pressed as "if-then" statements. What follows the "then' is a
judgment or action that constitutes a decision. But what follows
the "if"? Here are two possibilities:
(a) a goal (i.e., a consequence of the decision that is desired by
the subject);
(b) a context (i.e., a situation that calls forth a response,
namely, the decision).
The difference between (a) and (b) reflects a difference in how
one conceptualizes the subject in the experiments Baron cites.
Are subjects individuals who frame the context of action for
themselves, that is, select their own goals? Or, are subjects
provided the context by the experimenter and expected to
respond accordingly? Only the former interpretation (a) allows
a proper test of consequentialism as a normative theory of
rationality. If (a) and (b) are run together - as I believe they are
by Baron - then his consequentialism reverts to a form of
behaviorism, one akin to Skinner's operant conditioning, in
which the subjects' cognitive (deliberative) processes are no
longer relevant as long as the subjects respond in a way
that subsequently betters their chances of getting what they
want.
Consider the first experiment Baron cites to demonstrate
departures from consequentialism. Subjects must decide
whether they would vaccinate children against the flu, given
certain death rates associated with getting the flu and with
getting the vaccine. As it turned out, whether they saw them-
selves as parents or policymakers, the subjects erred on the side
of protecting children from possible death from the vaccine,
even if it meant increasing their chances of dying from the flu.
But, Baron notes, it was possible to correct the bias by making
the so-called Colden Rule argument to the subjects. What sorts
of considerations might lead one to conclude that this experi-
ment fails to demonstrate the force of consequentialism as a
normative theory of rationality? I offer three:
(1) Clearly, the subjects did not select the goal under terms of
which their decisions would be evaluated. Once a decision was
made, it was evaluated by a consequentialist norm, whose
validity had been established outside the experimental setting
and did not require the consent of the subjects. Subsequently,
arguments were introduced to make the subjects' responses
approximate the norm more closely. Why is this not simply an
instance of psychologists shaping the verbal behavior of sub-
jects, with no particular implications about cognitive or deliber-
ative processes?
(2) Moreover, why should one think that the ability to make
normatively appropriate decisions in response to hypothetical
situations would translate into normatively appropriate forms of
action in real-life settings? After all, when social psychologists
try to identify the norms governing a community, the conclu-
sions they reach can vary tremendously depending on whether
the investigator focuses on what people regularly do, what they
say the norms are, what sanctions they impose on the actions of
others, or what they say in response to hypothetical situations
(Collett 1977). These different normative indicators are typically
reinforced in different environments, and it is by no means clear
that a change in one such environment - say, subjects coming to
make the right hypothetical decisions - has any straightforward
implications for change in the other environments. This point is
of special import for Baron, whose pedagogical agenda seems to
include instilling consequentialist norms at a verbal level with-
out providing environments designed to put those norms into
practice. A cynic may justly wonder whether Baron's purely
verbal training in consequentialism might do more harm than
Commentary /Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
good by giving students ready-made rationalizations for what-
ever they decide to do.
(3) Baron may have dismissed too quickly Schick's (1991) point
that when subjects seem to make nonnormative decisions, they
may in fact be making normative decisions, once their implicit
frame of reference is understood. I agree with Baron that Schick's
But there is also the general point that when subjects are in a
position to frame their own goals, they may presuppose a more
complex decision-making environment than the one provided in
Baron's experiments. Two additional dimensions come imme-
diately to mind as relevant to real-life analogues to the vaccine
case: options to postpone a decision indefinitely or at least until
more information is obtained and other goals that simul-
taneously compete for the resources - both cognitive and fiscal -
available for making the decision. In real life, one rarely has to
make just one decision right now. (Not surprisingly, the classic
ethics textbook cited by Baron, Sidgwick [1907], presents utili-
tarianism not as a first-order norm but as a meta-norm for
resolving competing moral demands.) Perhaps all this boils
down to a plea for greater ecological validity in the subjects'
decision-making environments before their decisions are evalu-
ated. Ironically, this plea had already been made by behavior-
ists, who detected unrealistic assumptions about what might be
called the "instant (ir)rationality" of subjects in experimental
cognitive psychology (Rachlin et al. 1986).
Finally, I am struck by the remarkable lack of irony in the way
Baron starts his target article. Baron aligns himself with the
philosophical tradition in wanting to evaluate reasoning by its
form rather than by its consequences - even in the case of
consequentialism! Yet, "functionalists" in sociology and anthro-
pology have long claimed that whole cultures routinely violate
consequentialist norms because of the desirable consequences
that follow from such violations. Rain dances that are arbitrary
from the standpoint of explaining or predicting rainfall may be
latently instrumental in maintaining group solidarity, a meta-
goal, one might say, that is a precondition for individuals
achieving any other goal in the society. Admittedly, the inter-
pretation of such practices is controversial (e.g., Elster 1984),
but a consequentialist should remain open-minded about the
possibility that the long-term consequences of violating certain
consequentialist norms may actually be better than adhering to
such norms. Moreover, as amply witnessed in the resistance
that met Jeremy Benthams legislative reforms, when a norm is
known not to produce desirable consequences in all cases, it
may be better to circumvent or compensate for it in the particu-
lar cases than to design a more comprehensively consequential-
ist norm.
Moral errors
Clark Glymour
Department of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
15213
Electronic mall: clark.glymour@andrew.cmu.edu
I found Baron's target article very interesting, the kind of thing
that makes you want to have a beer and an argument with the
guy. So I hope he will forgive my customary indignant and
critical tone.
The paper invokes a moral parallel with studies of human
irrationality in deciding empirical questions. The latter work has
several sides, including (1) empirical studies revealing ways
people make such decisions, (2) explicit comparisons with alter-
native decisions that experimenters claim to be normative, and
(3) studies in which human decision making is shown to be
objectively suboptimal (e.g., comparisons of the accuracy of
expert prediction with that of prediction by regression). The
studies Baron reviews and proposes are parallels to (1) and (2). I
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1 17
Commentary/Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
think questions of how people come to have their moral sensi-
bilities are interesting in themselves, but Baron's project only
has implications for education and for policy if there is a moral
parallel to part (2), and there is only such a parallel if there is a
normative standard in ethics comparable to that used in studies
of empirical decision making. So is there?
One thought is that Bayesian decision theory - which seems
to be the common cognitive norm assumed in psychological
studies of human judgment - is also a moral norm. But then
nothing substantive follows from the norm without a specifica-
tion or elicitation of probabilities and utilities. In particular,
nothing follows for or against distinction between omission and
commission, which is what seems particularly to concern Baron.
Another proposal is utilitarianism: various outcomes have speci-
fiable values to persons according to objective features of the
people (e.g., how much stuff they already have), and right
actions are those that maximize the expected utility (averaged
over all persons). There are lots of reasons to think utilitarianism
is an incoherent norm: there is no empirical basis for compari-
sons of utility across persons - vaguely egalitarian principles are
a common substitute for evidence; there is no way to aggregate
probabilities and utilities from different people and satisfy
simple rational principles; it is doubtful that people even have
relevant probability judgments concerning remote outcomes;
depending on how utilities are distributed and compared, maxi-
mizing the average can require us to reduce the number of
people in the world to one, the utility monster. Utilitarianism
always was and remains a piece of social pseudoscience.
The structure of actual norms is not just nonutilitarian around
the edges. I do not suppose I am morally abnormal in most
respects, and I could not work less like an egalitarian utilitarian.
Many of my goals concern fulfilling a set of responsibilities that
have a kind of ordering of importance, with responsibilities to
children outweighing responsibilities to parents and spouse,
outweighing responsibilities to work, outweighing respon-
sibilities acquired through promises to others, outweighing a
general responsibility to do good where it is easy and to do no
harm unless it is justified. I have an elaborate if inarticulate
collection of sensibilities about when harm is justified. Other-
wise, I want personally to prosper, to be esteemed by others,
and to be able to esteem myself; I want the same for almost
everyone, but I am prepared to make costly efforts to those ends
only for those I care about. I do not at all think I am obliged to
treat others who are remote from me as moral equals of loved
ones and friends; I have never put a Somali through college. I do
not seriously entertain the general proposition that actively
doing good should excuse predictable harmful consequences;
and I do not want other people to do so either; otherwise,
checking into a hospital would be dangerous. I have an elabo-
rate, and again inarticulate, system of views about deference and
autonomy; I defer to others in acknowledging their rights to act
in all kinds of ways without interference from me, and I expect
others to defer to me. One of my principal goals is to keep my
realm of autonomy. In certain contexts (probably too few) I defer
to others' opinions about what is right, wrong, or prudent. Only
in very special contexts - for example, when I was a department
head and had to make policy decisions - have I deliberately tried
to figure out what action would be best on average over all
concerned, all things considered.
I think the structure of ethical judgment is similar in many
people. Looking over this structure, I am inclined to endorse it.
Maybe that is wrong. Maybe it would be better if we were more
like egalitarian utilitarians, but I do not see any rational demon-
stration of that proposition. (I suppose there are some moral
sentiments I have that I could be persuaded not to act on,
because they are irrational; for example, I vote out of a vague
sense of civic duty.) The argument Baron gives in the first part of
his target article to establish some such thing is so much
philosophical argle-bargle. The structure of the argument seems
to be this: In considering whether or not P, we must set aside any
18 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
reasons one might have relevant to P or not P, and now what
reason could there be for ~P? Clearly none; therefore P.
Assuming I am not anomalous, the structure of morality does
not much look like rule utilitarianism or any heuristic version of
utilitarianism. I would be amazed if the way children learn
morality is to mislearn utilitarian rules, which is what Baron's
line of inquiry conjectures. I am not even sure that I understand
what Baron means when he suggests that we learn some un-
utilitarian ethical preferences by "overgeneralizing.' Does he
mean, for example, that children mischaracterize what their
moral instructors would say in other circumstances? Does he
mean that children have some internal, inarticulate, utilitarian
standard natively, which in learning moral dispositions they
mischaracterize? What fact is it about the world that children
"overgeneralize'? I think the answer must be none of the above;
children who form moral dispositions Baron disapproves of have
not made any sort of inferential error at all.
I found Baron's suggestions about practical implications of his
project very strange, sort of like falling off a cliff with someone
and on the way down he complains about your bad breath and
offers a stick of chewing gum. Consider one of his examples: free
trade. Baron says utilitarian education might remove the argu-
ment that it is wrong to cause wealth to be redistributed, or
something like that. The concern that some not be harmed to
benefit others appears easily defeated by compensation prom-
ises. Witness Mr. Clinton. Some of the serious arguments
against free-trade policies show what is wrong with utilitari-
anism as it is now found in public policy, that is, as cost-benefit
analysis. One serious argument is that what is lost when an
industry collapses is not just money; it is community. People lose
their friends, their neighbors, their traditions, the company of
their adult children. Things fall apart. We have no scale to
measure those sorrows. Welfare economists image one, the way
you might imagine a diamond as big as the Ritz.
Psychological inquiry is relevant to free-trade disputes, and so
are ethical considerations, but not, I think, in Baron's way. The
most obvious connection is an issue' in social psychology: how
does a discipline, economics, that claims to be scientific, come
to enshrine and advocate a doctrine - the advantage to any and
all parties of unrestricted free trade - without a shred of
empirical evidence for the proposition? The arguments for the
mutual advantages of free trade are almost entirely theoretical,
based on analysis of interactions of two nations under circum-
stances that do not apply even approximately to any country in
the world. The ethical considerations are equally obvious: ac-
cess to the U. S. market is a still a prize that some other nations,
such as Mexico, are willing to pay a price to obtain; should we
not make decent economic treatment of Mexican citizens - a
decent minimum wage, worker safety, enforced laws against
externalizing costs, a judicial system that is not corrupt - part of
that price? You don't have to be any kind of utilitarian to answer
that question.
Consequences of consequentialism
Rick Grush
Departments of Philosophy and Cognitive Science, University of California,
San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0302
Electronic mail: rgrush@sdcc3.ucsd.edu
I would like to begin by dissociating two strands of Baron's target
article, the moral and the epistemological. I will argue that his
ethical claims are interesting, but not beyond question, and that
the epistemological issues he raises (as well as some he does not)
are of central importance.
First, even if one is a "consequentialist," two different phases
of the reasoning process can be distinguished. The first concerns
the prediction of the consequences of various actions and the

estimation of their "utility.' The second concerns the ethical
question: "What should I do?" - that is, even given total
knowledge of all consequences of candidate actions, the ethical
question of what to do remains. That they are in principle
distinct follows from their dissociability - one can be "good" at
either while being "bad" at the other.
I first want to point out that bare consequentialism qua
normative moral theory is not obviously adequate. The seed of
the problem is that it justifies "unfair" treatment, specifically,
the benefit of some through the harm of others. I say it is the
seed of the problem because unfairness itself may not always be
viewed as a problem. In fact, the examples Baron gives of
relative farmer incomes and of harm inflicted unfairly upon
people dependent on gasoline by increasing the gasoline tax
seem to support his point that unfairness may not always be
wrong. But these are relatively innocuous examples of unfair-
ness. The seed grows when greater numbers of people are taken
into consideration because it will always be possible to justify
arbitrarily unfair hardships to a few when it results in a benefit
to enough others.
To see the force of the last point, consider the following.
Utility calculations must take into account the benefits and
harms experienced by all people (and perhaps animals and
plants as well). But surely "all people" must include not just
those currently living, but future generations as well (presum-
ably, this is part of the motivation for environmentalists). No
doubt this number is tremendous, perhaps in the trillions or
more. Now suppose that some small benefit could be bestowed
on all these people, such as a fast painless treatment for the
elimination of all warts. Suppose further that such a treatment
could be developed, but it would require painful, drawn out
experimentation and vivisection of a hundred or so people
(determined at random). In principle, such a practice could be
justified. A consequentialist ethic will have to provide some
means for assigning utility to things like wart elimination and
painful death in order to get off the ground, and without some
sort of provision for "fairness" or basic human rights or dignities
it will be possible to justify the most heinous atrocities commit-
ted on a few, provided sufficient benefit accrues to the many (and
provided that the same benefits cannot be obtained by less harsh
methods). I chose a medical example because in these cases the
gains are likely to affect many future generations and because
the nature of medical research is sometimes unpleasant (as
"animal rights" literature makes clear). [See also Dawkins:
"From an Animal's Point of View" BBS 13(1) 1990.]
Two final points on this issue. First, the argument above does
not rely on the actual occurrence of situations such as the one
sketched. Though I think that many unfairnesses most of us
would find morally unacceptable could probably be justified on
consequentialist grounds, the point is that bare consequential-
ism provides no principled way to rule such possibilities out, and
this should worry us.
Second, it will be possible to sneak such considerations in the
back door, as it were, by factoring the horror, and other emo-
tions we (should) feel at the violation of such basic rights into the
utility calculation. But if this horror at human rights violations is
going to be a constant in all utility calculations then we might be
better advised to factor it out of the consequentialist ethic and
treat it (basic human dignities, etc.) as a separate ethical con-
straint or constraints on a par with, rather than subordinate to,
expected utility (especially when education policy is being
discussed).
That said, I would like to turn to epistemological concerns. I
can agree with Baron that the ability to reason clearly about
consequences is in general to be desired, even if one does not
always, for whatever reason, choose courses of action that have
the greatest bare utility. This improvement of reasoning is, as
Baron correctly notes, the task of prescriptive (and derivatively,
descriptive) epistemology; I would like to close by offering some
methodological cautions.
Commentary/Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
When normative models take the form of formalized systems,
such as inductive logic or expected utility calculus, it is natural to
think of deviations from the standard as the imperfect applica-
tion of those very standards. Thus we are led to a view of human
performance that posits some sort of normatively adequate
competence embodied (somehow) in our cognitive apparatus, a
competence of which we are unable to take full advantage
because of biases and the suboptimal functioning of related
cognitive "modules" (such as short-term memory).
Normatively, this may be acceptable. And perhaps for de-
scriptive purposes one can get by by positing a rational "lan-
guage of thought" and adding epicycles to account for deviations
from the standard, even if our cognitive architecture is not really
a "language of thought." But the prescriptive enterprise, to be
fully effective, should have an accurate picture of human cogni-
tive architecture and representational capacities. It is not
enough to compile lists of biases. Johnson-Laird (1983) takes a
step in this direction, as do Johnson (1987) and Lakoff (1987). In
the philosophical literature, criticism of normative models as
characterizations of unpolluted cognitive competence has been
provided by Churchland (1979; 1989) and Stich (1990).
My point, which is not necessarily at odds with anything
Baron says, is simply that prescriptive epistemology should look
to psychology not only for lists of biases, and so forth, but also for
theories of cognitive architecture that account for deviations and
that suggest useful improvements because they are actually true
of the brain.
Truth or consequences
John Heil
Department of Philosophy, Davidson College, Davidson, NC 28036
Electronic mail: joheil@apollo.davidson.edu
How are we to evaluate claims to the effect that consequential-
ism provides a correct normative or descriptive account of
rational decision? On the one hand, such claims might be
interpreted as pertaining to the character of principles govern-
ing or ideally governing agents' decisions. On the other hand,
they might be taken to concern, not principles deployed by
actual or ideal agents, but the character of the justification or
explanation of those principles. The cases come apart because it
could easily turn out that nonconsequentialist principles em-
braced by agents like us yield better outcomes - judged conse-
quentially -than do consequentialist principles (e. g, see Railton
1984). Owing to contingent biological, psychological, and envi-
ronmental factors, it might be true of us that we fare better by
instilling nonconsequentialist principles and encouraging their
development in others. If Mother Nature is a consequentialist,
then undoubtedly she has a hand in this process. Consequential-
ism might, in this way, succeed by concealing itself. Under the
circumstances, we should expect our intuitions about cases
occasionally to yield judgments different from those mandated
by explicitly consequentialist principles.
Imagine that our everyday assessments of the merit of options
open to us were based on estimates of the probability and
relative desirability of potential outcomes. Outcomes depend on
endless factors about which we may be partly or entirely igno-
rant, however, and their relative desirability may be difficult to
gauge. I am faced with a choice of telling the truth or lying to my
boss. The truth may hurt, but lying could have repercussions I
am at a loss to evaluate. Under the circumstances, my ends
might be better served by my inculcation of a nonconsequential-
ist, deontological principle that forbids lying per se. Having
embraced such a principle, I might blunder in various ways on
particular occasions. I might find myself compelled to tell the
truth when the consequences of my so doing would be disas-
trous. Suppose, in contrast, I were endowed with finer-grained
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1 19
Commentaryi'Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
principles tailored to allow for exceptions in light of special
circumstances. Such principles might prove self-defeating, how-
ever. They might be unwieldy, or they might inhibit social
bonds founded on trust, and so make me worse off on the whole.
This should not be read as an endorsement of a nonconse-
quentialist conception of rationality. The idea, rather, is that
consequentialism could well enjoin us to adopt nonconsequen-
tialist outlooks and attitudes. Nor should it be supposed that
nonconsequentialist principles we have embraced are really
consequentialist in nature, because they are explained or war-
ranted consequentially. The content of a principle must be
distinguished from its justification or explanation.
Baron's discussion of punishment provides a nice illustration
of what I have in mind. Imagine that the social institution of
punishment were warranted on the grounds that threats of
punishment serve as deterrents. How, then, do we account for
retributivist intuitions many of us have about particular cases?
Well, suppose that, for creatures like us, punishment deters
only so long as we harbor retributivist attitudes toward it. If I
expect to be punished for certain sorts of act even when my
being so punished produces no benefit, I may be less inclined to
engage in acts of that sort than otherwise.
Reason, traditionally, is divided into intellectual, or epis-
temic, and practical components. Epistemic reason governs
belief; practical reason, action. Baron focuses on the latter. In
his view, practical reason operates, and ought to operate on
consequentialist principles. Errors and biases result from "over-
generalizing" these principles. I am envisaging a different sort of
accounting for these same errors and biases within a consequen-
tialist framework, one that receives a measure of support from a
consideration of the relation of epistemic and practical reason.
It is natural to imagine that, whereas practical reason is
concerned with desire satisfaction, epistemic reason aims at
truth. Certainly we value patterns of reasoning that increase the
probability that our beliefs are true. But why is truth valuable?
Again, it is natural to suppose that we are better off with true
beliefs; whatever our ends, we are more likely to attain them if
we believe what is true (see Campbell 1974). Indeed, it may
seem obvious that a creature whose beliefs were largely false
would find its practical ends difficult or impossible to achieve.
Note, however, that a conception of this sort assigns truth an
instrumental role in deliberation: truth has value chiefly be-
cause it promotes other ends that we happen to value. (This is
not to say that truth, like almost anything else, could not have
noninstrumental, intrinsic value for some creature, only that its
significance need not depend on its having intrinsic value.)
What of those cases in which we should be better off without
true belief? Sometimes the truth hurts too much, sometimes it
obliterates important ends and projects. True belief, or belief
proportioned to the evidence, often enough promotes our ends,
but it need not. I may accomplish more by repressing well-
founded doubts about my likelihood of success; I may benefit
from self-deception, just as I may benefit from deceiving others
(indeed the two sorts of deception may be related; see Alexander
1979, pp. 134-39).
Suppose, then, that we regard epistemic reason as subserving
practical ends. Given our fallibility and our circumstances,
these ends may require that we inculcate truth-linked, noncon-
sequential, deontological epistemic principles. These will lead
to misfortune occasionally, but given our psychological and
biological constitution and our circumstances, they may be
clearly preferable to consequentialist counterparts (for a de-
tailed discussion of this view, see Heil 1992).
The issues here are subtle. I have suggested that the very
considerations that make consequentialist conceptions of ratio-
nality attractive should lead us to distinguish (1) principles on
which agents act or ought to act, from (2) principles relative to
which the former principles are justified or explained. Our
psychology, biology, and environment encourage the adoption
of consequentialist decision strategies. Consequentialism may
20 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
compel us to acquire nonconsequentialist motives, however.
And if that is so, we should not be surprised when intuitions
about cases, and so our judgments, exhibit nonconsequentialist,
deontological "biases."
Elicitation rules and incompatible goals
Julie R. Irwin
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL 61820
Electronic mail: jirwin@s.psych.uiuc.edu
Now that decision theorists are resigned to the occurrence of
systematic variation in preferences and values by elicitation
mode, researchers with an interest in decision quality are left
with the task of evaluating which value, if any, of people's range
of expressed values is the best. Clearly, inconsistency of prefer-
ence over elicitation mode is not rational, but inconsistency is
robust and prevalent, and psychological theories of rational
choice must not only demand consistency but also make explicit
the reasons why certain values are to be preferred to others.
Baron has proposed a simple, general rule to separate good (i.e.,
normative) preferences from bad ones: unfortunately, the appli-
cation of the rule is left a bit unexplored, especially for cases in
which there are contradictory best outcomes of a decision.
In Baron's formulation, people have personal goals (or sets of
goals); the best decision maximizes the accomplishment of those
goals. This principle implies that disparate goals can be inte-
grated into one metagoal, that there are single "best conse-
quences" of a decision, and that we would "judge them [to be
best consequences] in the absence of a decision." The notion
that there is a single best consequence (or set of tied conse-
quences) resulting from a single integrated goal is central to
Baron's thesis, but the process by which goals get integrated and
consequences evaluated is left vague.
Decisions are difficult when they require forgoing some
attractive attributes to obtain others. Consequentialism would
imply that attributes that are less likely to accomplish our goals
should be traded in favor of attributes that are more likely to lead
us toward what we want. The decision problem becomes more
subtle, however, when different attributes favor different goals;
for example, we want to win a tennis tournament that we cannot
win fairly, but we want to behave fairly. Complex and risky items
such as environmental changes force people to make especially
difficult trade-offs among compelling and often conflicting goals
(e.g., personal immediate pleasure, safety, benefits for future
generations, desire to save money). As Baron implies, different
elicitation modes produce differential emphases on certain
types of attributes and goals. When faced with departing from
the status quo, for example, people may decide "if it ain't broke,
don't fix it," and make a different choice from the one they may
have made under another elicitation mode - with its own
(different) rule. Baron shows legitimate concern over this incon-
sistency of preference due to elicitation-mode rules and at-
tempts to understand the inconsistency by understanding the
source and application of the rules. Understanding the rules is
only part of the problem, though. Without the next step of
determining which conflicting aspects of a decision are empha-
sized by given rules and then postulating which aspects are most
important for an integrated, best consequence, it is difficult to
link the psychological process of decision-rule application with
the normative standard of consequentialism.
Research on how people evaluate environmental changes has
illustrated how elicitation-mode rules can differentially empha-
size incompatible goals. For example, when subjects are asked
to evaluate environmental improvements (e.g., an increase in
air quality) and market trades (e.g., a trade from a worse
television to a better one), they are more likely to prefer the
environmental improvements when they are choosing or rating

than when they are providing buying prices (Brown 1984; Irwin
etal. 1993; Magatetal. 1988). Subjects also prefer environmen-
tal trades more when they are providing selling prices than
when they are providing buying prices (Gregory 1986; Irwin, in
press). Evaluations among market commodities and environ-
mental improvements force the competing goal issue because
market commodities are likely to satisfy goals (such as personal
satisfaction) that are quite different from environmental changes
(which carry a heavy moral component). Indeed, in Irwin's (in
press) study, the correlation between ratings of moral aspects
and prices is significantly higher in selling modes than in buying
modes, indicating differential attention to goals in the two
modes.
Baron's research suggests that buying/selling discrepancies
are a result of omission and status quo rules; the desire to "do no
harm" and "stay put" requires attention to morally harmful
aspects of trading for a worse environmental situation in selling
modes, but the absence of such rules allows for attention to more
personal concerns in buying modes. For a consequentialist,
though, explaining the source of inconsistency is not enough;
given that people do have both moral and personal goals, we
need some way of evaluating what environmental values best
express people's.preferred consequences.
Baron states that consequences should be judged apart from
particular decision processes; decisions should show the same
rank order as their consequences, if the consequences were
themselves evaluated "in the absence of a decision." This formu-
lation makes sense because it allows the consequences to remain
impervious to fluctuations in value due to elicitation mode. The
application is difficult, though partly because the judgment of
consequence often occurs in some elicitation context. When
faced with a choice among consequences, people are likely to
construct their choices on line (Gregory et al. 1993; Payne et al.
1992), just as they do other sorts of choices, and constructed
preferences are subject to elicitation effects. The key is to
measure preference for consequence without eliciting prefer-
ences; Baron attempts to do this for several of his decision
classes by positing what the best consequences must, logically,
be - punishment must produce deterrence, compensation
should depend on the nature of the injury, and so on. But for the
policy maker, for example, who wishes to discern which of a
wide range of values is the true (or best) one for a given
environmental change, such logic rules are not readily available,
in part because that one value must satisfy a number of equally
viable goals. To be of help to policy makers and others in need of
normative standards, the consequentialist approach should ex-
plicate how inconsistent consequences are to be evaluated,
including guidelines for how trade-offs among goals can be
resolved to lead to one, best, decision.
Departing from consequentialism versus
departing from decision theory
Frank Jackson
Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian
National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia
Electronic mail: fcj@coombs.anu.edu.au
We think of certain departures from the principles encapsulated
in probability theory, logic, decision theory, and Bayesian con-
firmation theory as irrational. For example, it is irrational to be
more confident of the truth of a conjunction than of one of its
conjuncts, and this norm corresponds to the fact that a conjunc-
tion cannot be more probable than either of its conjuncts.
Should we think of departures from consequentialist principles
in the same way? I think this is a good question for Baron to have
asked, but there is nevertheless a centrally important difference
between the two cases.
Commentary I V>&r on: Nonconsequentialist decisions
Baron reminds us of the literature that details cases in which
we violate one or another principle laid down in, for example,
decision theory and probability theory (in its manifestation as a
calculus of belief). In consequence, decision theory and proba-
bility theory cannot be thought of as purely descriptive; they
must be thought of as having at least some normative force.
However, it is vital that they are closely answerable to the
descriptive facts.
There are two reasons for this. The first is a familiar point
about interpretation. In deciding what a person believes and
desires we are of necessity required to work from what they do
in circumstances. We do this by assigning them the beliefs and
desires that by and large make sense of what they do in
circumstances. But the beliefs and desires that: by and large
make sense of what they do are those that would make what they
do maximise expected utility! If what someone does is too far
removed from what they ought to do according to decision
theory, we lose our entitlement to hold that they are believers
and desirers at all.
The second reason concerns rationality. Our best approach to
what counts as rational is that encapsulated in the familiar
reflective equilibrium story mentioned by Baron. A crucial part
of this story is that the irrational gets recognised sooner or later
as such by most of us provided we are on our toes. Those who do
the irrational thing, typically, though not invariably, acknowl-
edge that it is irrational when the matter is drawn to their
attention and conform their future behaviour more closely to
what is rational.
The centrally important difference in the case of departures
from consequentialist decision making is that so many of them
are robust departures. I am sympathetic to consequentialism
and find it hard to see why many nonconsequentialists think
that, for instance, the distinction between doing and allowing is
morally crucial, or, alternatively, that the distinction between
what is directly intended and what is merely foreseen is morally
crucial. But I cannot pretend that the view that one or both of
these distinctions are morally important is akin to accepting the
gamblers' fallacy, or to giving a conjunction greater credence
than one of its conjuncts. Highly intelligent, rational people
persist in maintaining the importance of one or both of these
distinctions even after exhaustive discussion of the question.
I suspect that the difference between those of a fundamentally
consequentialist frame of mind in ethics and those of a resolutely
nonconsequentialist frame of mind is like the difference be-
tween one- and two-boxers about Newcomb's problem. Con-
sensus among highly intelligent, rational people on whether to
two-box or to one-box in Newcomb's problem is notoriously
absent even after the most exhaustive discussion of the issues
(Nozick 1969). In the case of decision theory we can remain
reasonably relaxed about the dissension. In practice, it hardly
ever matters. By contrast, the difference between consequen-
tialist and nonconsequentialist approaches to what ought to be
done is highly relevant to many decisions we face every day.
On begging the question when naturalizing
norms
Leonard D. Katz
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139
Electronic mail: lkatz@athena.mit.edu
Baron believes that "in any inquiry about what norms we should
endorse, it is important that we put aside the norms we already
have, lest we beg the question" and that for the same reason we
should also "put aside goals that derive from those standards."
What is left to work from? Only those goals that are unsupported
by norms, taken at their face values, and, presumably, also those
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1 21
Commentary/Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
others that derive only some of their weight from norms,
appropriately discounted. Isolating the normatively derived
from the remainder will often be difficult in practice, even if a
theoretical distinction is always available. But, disregarding
those problems, the following is a simple case of the method at
work.
Suppose you are a prospective teenage suicide. You know this
thought is imprudent. You also know your life would get better
later and give you all sorts of new goals and new reasons for
living. But you have none of these goals and reasons now, and not
even the goal of acquiring future goals. You are now moved
strongly by only one goal, suicide. So on Baron's method, that is
what you should do. Next, suppose also that I am someone
disinterestedly concerned with your welfare. I might think I
should try to give you new goals and reasons for living, and,
minimally, that I should advise you strongly that you really
ought to consider the future in a way that will give you the goal of
living. But, according to Baron, in reasoning that seems to
transfer completely from his case of vaccination, "I have no
reason, altruistic or selfish, to endorse a norm that leads you to
have such a goal if you do not already have it, for it will not help
you achieve your goals, or mine. Yours, because you have no
strong goals other than suicide at this time. Mine, because I am
completely disinterested - perhaps because I am in the same
situation myself. In that case, we ought to help each other
commit suicide, even if we know we could talk each other out of
it and live happily ever after. This does not count, because it is
not a goal either of us has now. And similarly, if we were two well-
informed drug addicts who could help each other out of our
addictions, we should not, even if we think we should, so long as
we want the drugs more.
When we "put aside the norms we already have" we do worse.
That is sufficient reason for rejecting Baron's strategy of holding
our present desires immune from criticism when we know
better. Is this begging the question? No more than Baron's
privileging of our "nonnormative" goals. A better method would
be to move back and forth between the different levels of our
goals and norms and, unless we are very wise, to take as models
the value beliefs and practical reasoning of those we think wise -
as people naturally do from an early age, in much the way we
acquire and change our factual beliefs and epistemic norms.
Although this method is vague, it is at least not wildly wrong.
How could consequentialism, which tells us to try to do our
best to make things better, tell us to make things less good
through our suicide, than we know they would have been had we
lived? The problem here is not with consequentialism as I
formulated it (more standardly than Baron) but with the theories
of well-being and of rational action that Baron has run together
with it. Baron's goal-achievement view of well-being is one that,
following Parfit (1984), we may call the actual-unrestricted-
desire-fulfillment theory. This theory, formerly fashionable in
economics and philosophy, has been roundly criticized more
recently for many reasons that I can no more than hint at here
(Bond 1983, especially pp. 40-46; Brandt 1979, Ch. 13; Griffin
1986, pp. 10-17; Katz 1986, especially pp. 41-3; Parfit 1984,
pp. 493-98; Scanlon 1993, especially pp. 191-93; Sen
1980/1981, especially pp. 198-207; the obvious ways of fixing
the problems run into problems of their own). The upshot,
following Bond, Katz, and Scanlon, is that, except in unimpor-
tant cases, our desires do not ground or justify our actions.
Rather, desires more typically follow upon the value that we
perceive or believe states of affairs have independently of our
desiring.
To this mistake in value theory Baron adds a rarer one about
rationality; that only a person's present goals should be consid-
ered - not only by the person himself but also by another who
aims to benefit him. Thus, to benefit my child I should assist her
suicide in my earlier example and I should also most benefit my
6-year-old by buying 20-year futures on real fire engines if that
assurance for the future is what he most wants now. And he
22 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
should do anything he can to get me to do this - otherwise we
are behaving irrationally, you see. These two theories (and the
many failed attempts to fix them without introducing substan-
tive values) should be left in the dustbin of the history of
philosophy and economics. Surely they should not be resur-
rected to a new career in psychology. For even if they were
correct, they are still not what people believe human well-being
or benevolence consist in, and thus they will not be reflected in
people's practical reasoning or in the norms people endorse -
the latter being the data from which Baron hopes to abstract
norms.
One last point. Why can't even respecting rights count as a
goal in a consequentialist system, as Sen (1982) suggests? To
show such goals to be mistaken, some more substantively
normative criticism than that allowed by Baron's instrumentally
justified norms or prescriptions based on other goals would be
needed - if we are not to beg the question by playing favorites
between goals. (And is instrumental rationality itself to be
justified instrumentally by its consequences?) Neither will a
merely descriptive account of the evolution of a goal suffice to
discredit it, as Sidgwick (1907, Book 1, Ch. 4), best ofconse-
quentialists, observed. There seems to be no general way to
attack particular substantive norms without having others.
Jonathan Baron, consequentialism and error
theory
Sanford S. Levy
Department of History and Philosophy, Montana State University,
Bozeman, MT 59717
Electronic mail: 2pi7001%msu.dnet.@mtsu.nix1
Baron is concerned with "error theory" in respect to moral
belief: the explanation of why people make the errors that they
do. This is of interest for several reasons. For example, it can cast
doubt on previously accepted beliefs by showing that they were
formed by unreliable mechanisms.
Baron is a consequentialist. Consequentialist concern with
error theory goes back to Bentham and Mill, who cast doubt on
deontological intuitions that conflict with utilitarianism by argu-
ing that they had an epistemologically suspect origin in our
"sympathies and antipathies." Baron also argues that deon-
tological intuitions have faulty origins. He believes they arise
from overgeneralization of rules that are consistent with conse-
quentialism in a limited set of cases. Presumably, the error he
has in mind is the textbook fallacy of "hasty generalization." We
notice that something is true in some cases, but we form a rule
more general than our evidence warrants.
If this is how deontological beliefs are formed, the process is
faulty. But though many intuitive deontological principles can
be viewed as overgeneralizations of rules that are consistent
with consequentialism when applied to a limited set of cases,
this does not mean that these intuitions arise from overgeneral-
ization. Though this is probably how people sometimes come to
moral principles, it is not a plausible general account.
Consider an example that Baron takes to be typical. A parent,
Rena, might teach her child, Sanford, "Never lie," because she
wants Sanford to be liked. But, Baron says, because the rules are
typically spur-of-the-moment inventions, they are usually
flawed as means to parents' goals. Because lying sometimes
makes one better liked, teaching "Never lie" as a means to being
liked is an overgeneralization.
Let us look at this example more closely. Relative to Rena's
goal of having Sanford liked, "Never lie" is too general. But this
is not the only goal of many parents when they teach their
children deontological rules. Most also have the goal of raising
morally upright children and believe that various deontological
rules are, in fact, correct. Even relative to this goal, parents

might initially teach overgeneralized rules, because more de-
tailed ones are hard for the young to learn. Usually, however,
parents will ultimately teach all requisite complexities. And
they do this not only because they wish a well-liked child, but
because they wish an upright child.
Rena might want Sanford both liked and upright. But even
here, she need not have overgeneralized. She may be aware that
relative to the goal of well-liked children, the rule is too general,
nevertheless she may believe that it should be taught for the
sake of having an upright child. She might view the admittedly
partial coincidence between being upright and being liked as
just an added, though not unambiguous, reason for teaching the
general rule.
Thus, it is possible, and probably common, for parents to
teach deontological rules without overgeneralizing with respect
to their goals. If overgeneralization is to be a general explanation
for how deontological beliefs arise, the overgeneralization must
come elsewhere. One possibility is that, if it is not the parent
who overgeneralizes, it is the child. But again, though children
can overgeneralize relative to their goals, this is not a plausible
general account of how they come to have deontological
intuitions.
To see this, assume that Rena believes one should never lie,
and has the goal of an upright child, and hence has not herself
overgeneralized when she teaches "Never lie." Sanford over-
generalizes in learning "Never lie" if he adopts the rule only
because he believes it will make him liked. But Sanford can also
learn this rule without any overgeneralization. Like Rena, he
might have other goals relative to which "Never lie" is not an
overgeneralization. For example, he may wish to learn what
Rena is trying to teach and to be the sort of person of whom she
will approve. Relative to these goals, "Never lie" is not an
overgeneralization. Indeed, given these goals, if Sanford
learned anything else, he would be in error!
Might overgeneralization occurred anywhere else? Perhaps
even if Rena is not currently overgeneralizing, she may have
done so in the past when she first learned the rule "Never lie."
But though errors could have occurred in her past life, her
situation when she acquired her moral belief was much like that
of her own child. Because Sanford can acquire this rule without
overgeneralization, Rena as a child could have done so as well.
Seeking people who could have made the error still earlier
simply sets up a regress where, at each stage, similar points can
be made. If one goes back far enough, it is certain someone
made the error Baron describes. But as we work back, all sorts of
errors were made, and there is no reason to give priority to
overgeneralization in our account of how deontological intu-
itions arise.
In sum, though some people undoubtedly overgeneralize in
the adoption of deontological moral beliefs, this is not a plausible
general account of how deontological intuitions arise. This does
not mean these intuitions are not errors - any consequentialist
such as Baron or me must believe they are. But I do not believe
they can be reduced to a single kind of reasoning error, such as
overgeneralization.
On the other hand, there is value in seeing our deontological
intuitions as overgeneralized versions of consequentialist princi-
ples. For even if no one ever made the error of overgeneraliza-
tion Baron describes, it is possible to find a common theme in
the moral principles one accepts and to view this as being what
the principles are, in some sense, really trying to get at, though
not with perfect accuracy. This Kantian extraction of general
moral principles from what Kant calls "the ordinary knowledge
of morality" may be a valuable addition to Baron's other argu-
ments for consequentialism.
Commentary I Raron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
Consequentialism in haste
Roger A. McCain
Department of Economics, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA 19104
Electronic mail: mccainra@dunx1.ocs.drexel.edu
Because I tend to agree with Baron that consequentialism is a
valid frame for the evaluation of actions and policies and that
people often act on confused consequentialist rationales (Mc-
Cain 1991a; 1991b; 1992), I would very much like to agree with
his reasoning. However, it seems to me that he is too hasty, and,
indeed - so far as I understand his argument - has made one
fallacy offset another.
The fundamental fallacy is the modal1 fallacy of attempting to
deduce "ought" from "is." (I take it that a "prescriptive" theory is
one that tells people what they "ought" to do.) Baron's argument
here is intuitively persuasive: he says that we should endorse
norms that help us attain our goals, simply because our goals are
our goals. Therefore, because Adolph Hitler had the goal of
exterminating the Jews, the norm "kill Jews" should be en-
dorsed, at least by Hitler. Two things are wrong with this. First,
it takes the goals as given, and second (to be valid as a basis for
normative thinking or prescription) it attributes moral propriety
to them. Instead, we should ask ourselves what the proper goals
are, and, if our goals are not proper, we should adopt others that
are. Hitler should not endorse the norm "kill Jews" and should
change his goals.
Here is another difficulty Baron overlooks: there are a num-
ber of well-known cases in which behavior according to a
nonconsequentialist rule gives rise to better consequences than
any explicitly consequentialist rule can. The best known of these
cases is the repeated prisoners' dilemma (e.g. Axelrod 1984;
McCain 1992, p. 211) but perhaps the most provocative example
is the chain store paradox2 (McCain 1992,pp. 211-12; Selten
1978). In these cases, a simple consequentialism is reduced to
absurdity.
Baron states that our only reason for endorsing norms is that
they advance our goals. However, there is a whole family of
deontological norms to which some people genuinely subscribe
(McCain 1991a). According to a deontological norm, the right-
ness or wrongness of an act is inherent in the act, independent of
the consequences. Thus, contraception is seen as being wrong,
regardless of the fact that contraception has no bad conse-
quences and may well have good ones. One might disagree with
this way of thinking about moral questions, but simply to assert
that they do not exist is hardly satisfactory (on the rationality of
such rules, see McCain 1991a). In particular, it seems likely that
many of those who make a moral distinction between active and
passive euthanasia do so on the basis of a deontological rule: "It is
wrong to kill."
Baron then claims that rules that are deontological in form
occur because of a fallacy of overgeneralization. Without deny-
ing that this sort of thing can occur, one might suggest that
Baron has committed his own fallacy here: he has over-
generalized a common, but by no means universal, occurrence.
Nevertheless, I would think that Baron's diagnosis is right as
often as it is wrong. Many rules that appear deontological
probably do arise by confusion from consequentialist reasoning.
I have argued that (to be modally sound) a "rationale" must have
a three-part structure, arguing from a value premise via an
assertion of fact to an imperative conclusion. The assertion of fact
is or entails that valued consequences follow from the action (see
Hare [1952/1972] for the roots of this idea in moral philosophy).
Then an action is rational insofar as it is undertaken on the basis
of a valid rationale; in addition, it is moral if the value premise is
a morally valid one. But rationales can fail in various ways, some
worse than others. For example, a deduction of consequences
from an action may not be formally valid but may nevertheless
capture a correlation that is common enough that the deduction
establishes a "defeasible" prima facie case for the conclusion
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1 23
Commentary/Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
(Pollock 1986). Thus, rationality is relative, not absolute. Some
rationales (for the same decision) may be better than others,
whereas those may in turn be better than still others.
Moreover, there is good reason to think that people are
usually imperfectly rational — that is, that the rationales on
which they act are inferior (on some tests) to some other
rationales on which they might act. For example, people may
use rules based on rough correlations when more complex rules,
which yield better correlations, are available. The more com-
plex rules would give rise to actions better suited to the specific
cases but they are not known to the decision makers who use the
simpler rule. All the same, they are "irrational" in a normative
sense. Their actions are inconsistent with their own values, as
their values are expressed in the value premises of the rationales
on which they act. This inconsistency justifies the characteriza-
tion of the actions as "irrational."
Accordingly - as Baron contends - a normative model can be
supplied to evaluate decisions, and we may hope that with
systematic research and education it might be possible to
improve the decisions on which both public policy and private
action are based. But if this research and teaching is based on
Baron's narrow consequentialism, it will fail. However confused
some deontological-like reasoning may be, some of it reflects
clear thought and the deepest value commitments of the people
who express it. Teaching that runs contrary to these deep value
commitments will be rejected. The consequences of such teach-
ing would be regrettable. I conclude that a consistent conse-
quentialism must respect the deontological commitments of
some of our neighbors (although, so far as I know, there is no
reciprocal duty for deontologists to respect the value commit-
ments of consequentialists). In this, Baron has failed; and the
failure is dangerous.
NOTES
1. For an introductory discussion of modal logic, see Chellas (1980);
note also Elster (1978).
2. Counterterrorism expresses the chain store paradox in a practical
context, as does entry deterrence in oligopoly.
Does consequentialism pay?
Adam Morton
Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1TB, United
Kingdom
Electronic mall: adam.morton@bristol.ac.uk
To study errors in moral reasoning one has to know what is not an
error. Baron takes it that a moral norm is correct if it would be in
everyone's interest for it to be universally adhered to. And he
takes it that consequentialism passes this test. But it is not
obvious that it does. For example, if you are cleverer than most
people, you might be better off if you were not obliged to tell the
truth, even if it made you less confident that others were not
lying. And if you are richer than most, you may be better off if
you are not obliged to help others. So you might want to make a
difference between acts and omissions. Baron's picture of ethics
is, in effect, that it is what would result from a contract between
perfectly rational agents. But recent discussions (for example,
Danielson 1991) make it clear that social contracts depend on
the initial situations of the contractors and the constraints
determining which aspects of their situation may affect the
contract. It is in fact pretty unlikely that we can talk of the unique
social contract that would represent a fair and mutually advan-
tageous bargain among an actual group of people.
One might suppose that consequentialism was at any rate
sometimes the optimal norm, which would be to everyone's
benefit. But there are serious doubts here. Full consequential-
ism requires that one consider the consequences over all time
and for all people of all the options open to one, and choose the
24 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
one that is best on some measure. Ignore problems about the
measure. Can one think of all persons for all future times?
Obviously not. But however many persons and however far into
the future one has considered, one can always think a little
farther. Is expending the effort to think a little farther always
sensible? Obviously not. The conclusion, then, is that conse-
quentialism makes heuristics inevitable in moral decision-
making. One heuristic that obviously emerges is something like
Simon's satisficing (Simon 1982; Slote 1985). But there are surely
many others (Morton 1991). Which ones will pay off on average
will depend on the temporal range of our averaging, the popula-
tion we average over, their way of life, and their physical
situation.
The social contract point of view isolates one objective core to
morality: the mutual advantage we gain by cooperating with one
another. But there are limits to this objectivity. If we want to talk
of mistakes in moral reasoning, we have to think carefully.
Mistakes for whom faced with what range of situations under
what restrictions on their powers of deliberation?
Side effects: Limitations of human rationality
Keith Oatley
Centre for Applied Cognitive Science, Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1V6
Electronic mail: oatley@oise.on.ca
By making explicit the idea that we should think in terms of
goals, I believe Baron casts the theory of reasoning into the most
productive framework possible. Yet I also believe the analysis
lacks something essential. Consequentialism as stated here is a
doctrine for gods who are omniscient (with perfect mental
models) and omnipotent (without limitations of resources). Gods
are perfectly rational planners of the kind that programmers
would like artificial intelligence planners to be in the limited
domains in which they operate.
The shortcomings of perfect rationality as a model of human
cognition were pointed out by Neisser (1963) and Simon (1967). I
deal first with Simon's point. Human mental models are imper-
fect - we cannot foresee all consequences of actions. Resources
such as time and materials are limited - we cannot control the
world. Simon argued that the design of any intelligent system
therefore needs to include priority management, for example,
using interrupts to stop computing toward a goal when some-
thing important occurs that was unforeseen.
Baron does allow for uncertainty. He says that in deciding
between two political programs we should choose that which is
best on the whole; it is irrelevant that the other might turn out
better by luck. The implication is that such choices will be
possible in general and that uncertainty can be consigned to a
residual category, luck. Garfinkel (1967) had a better name, "the
et cetera category," to contain everything we could not think of.
Though I accept the argument of consequentialism as correct
in principle, it may not help if the et cetera category is large:
consider that in Baron's arguments there are biases toward
omission and the status quo. In Baron's experiments on deciding
whether or not to vaccinate, the problem is presented in terms
of a perfect mental model: the only consequences of vaccination
are protection of a child against a 10 in 10,000 chance of dying if
vaccination were omitted and a lesser risk of dying from the
vaccine. But this model is not perfect. One unmentioned factor
is that as more children in a population are vaccinated the
incidence of the disease in other children (including those of
friends and relatives) decreases because unvaccinated people
are less likely to be infected. Thus, the vaccination problem
described by Baron is oversimplified. More generally, if I were a
subject deciding about vaccination I might think that I did not
know enough about disablement potentially caused by the

vaccine, or by the procedure, or by mistakes in vaccination
clinics. Events in the history of side effects might come to mind:
infection with HIV virus from blood products, the many acci-
dents in nuclear power plants despite confident calculations of
infinitesimal risks. A bias toward omission might be a good
heuristic because the status quo is better known. People in
Baron's study who chose vaccination only when it meant reduc-
ing risk by at least half may not have been irrational. Perhaps
they allowed for an et cetera factor.
Science provides us with mental models, but we admit they
are incomplete: scientific theories are corrigible. We now recog-
nize that several technical benefits have been accompanied by
bad side effects that were largely unforeseen - world population
increase is driven by medical technology, global warming may
be caused by burning fossil fuels, ozone depletion is caused by
refrigerants. Norms of the kind in which Baron is interested can
be generated by allowing for unexpected side effects: we should
make large changes carefully, a little at a time.
Another factor in decision making was pointed out by Neisser
(1963): human action often has several goals. Consider hiring
someone. Two goals might be: best for the job, and member of
an ethnic minority. These goals might be satisfied by the same
person - or they might not. This again shows the impossibility
for some decisions to be perfectly rational. Such problems are
often handled by trying to assess all goals on a single metric, and
Baron refers to ranking outcomes as better or worse. In indus-
trialized societies, the universal metric is money - it is no
accident that we find it in many of Baron's studies. But incom-
mensurable goals cannot be ranked on the same scale, hence
there is no rational way of choosing among certain outcomes.
And, as De Sousa (1987) points out, even if we construct
schemes for ranking goals, there is no rational way of choosing
among them. For instance, we could not know in general
whether it is best to minimize losses or to maximize gains, or to
mix both strategies.
Another problem of human action that limits rationality arises
from many of our goals being achievable only by cooperating
with others (Oatley 1992). In joint plans, people can generally be
relied on, but because others as well as ourselves are subject to
errors, misunderstandings, and limitations, an extra layer of
uncertainty is added. With conflict rather than cooperation, the
problem gets worse.
In the Western history of ideas it has generally been thought
that ethics and rationality are the province of philosophy. But, as
Nussbaum (1986) has pointed out, there is a parallel literature in
which the same problems are handled differently. This is the
literature starting with the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sopho-
cles, and continuing in the modem novel. Here the emphasis is
on how the effects of human action cannot be fully calculated
(e.g., Oedipus Rex), and how the goals of different people even
in an ostensibly cooperative relationship cannot always be rec-
onciled (e.g., Antigone). Such literature allows us to explore
vital issues beyond the horizon of human calculation.
Baron's arguments for consequentialism are restricted in their
present form because they do not seem to apply to decision
making in the real world where there are limitations of knowl-
edge and other resources, multiple goals, cooperation, and
Conflict with other people. In addition to norms such as those
Baron proposes, understanding how rationality might be ap-
proached needs heuristics, and studies to show how well such
heuristics do in different settings. As Kierkegaard (1938) put it in
a journal entry in 1843: "It is perfectly true, as philosophers say,
that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the
other proposition, that it must be lived forwards."
CommentaryVBaron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
Some examples of nonconsequentialist
decisions
Gerald M. Phillips
Professor Emeritus of Speech Communication, Pennsylvania State
University, State College, PA 16801
Electronic mail: gmp@psuvm.psu.edu
In his abstract, Baron defined consequentialism using the word
"should' as a cohortative showing moral obligation (see Random
House Dictionary, p. 1771) and asks us to endorse consequen-
tialism as a standard of decision making. The purpose of this
commentary is to point to two cases of decision making where
this standard would be impossible or undesirable. Baron be-
lieves that we should "make decisions based on our judgments
about their consequences for achieving our goals." Presumably,
goal-directed thinking is superior to any of its alternatives.
John Dewey (1919) described the standard process of decision
making in problem solving to consist of five steps, which,
incidentally, he did not offer as moral directives:
1. Feeling that a difficulty or problem exists.
2. Definition of the problem.
3. Setting goals for a solution.
4. Surveying solutions and weighing them against the goals.
5. Selecting a solution and putting it into operation; testing
the outcomes against the goals.
McBurney (1935) adapted Dewey's description into a set of
rules for problem solving in groups. Subsequently, they have
been institutionalized into a "standard agenda for decision
making" (Phillips 1966). There have been several studies (cf.
bibliography to Gouran et al. 1993) to adjudicate whether
agenda-based discussion generated "better" decisions than dis-
cussion guided by other motives, including those advocated by
Baron himself. All of those studies were flawed, however, in
being hypothetical. There are few case histories in which deci-
sion making is actually explored and evaluated.
The problem with consequentialism is that it presumes (1)
that people have goals, (2) that they are aware of them, (3) that
they are able to use them consciously to direct the decision-
making process, and (4) that if they do have goals, the outcomes
will be better than if they do not. There is the latent assumption
that the mere fact of having a goal is ipso facto virtuous, however
immoral or pointless the goal might be. It also presumes that the
goal is not the process. Later, I offer two examples, one of
decision making where the goal is the process; the other where
the goal is obvious but undesirable. Baron's foundation, like
McBurney s before him, has two fatal flaws. It implies, first, that
all goals are virtuous, and second, that solutions arising from
kairos (inspiration) can be effective.
Central to Baron's formulation is the notion of decision rules.
He notes that "people have deep commitments to their deci-
sion rules, and they own these commitments." The same
holds true for those committed to an "agenda" in its various
forms.
Young's (1993) study, however, concluded that training in
goal-centered decision-making techniques does not necessarily
result in higher quality decisions, nor does it appear to affect the
scores on the Test of Critical Thinking Ability (Johnson 1943).
Young, adjudicating the results, noted that people often come to
"correct" (practical, productive, virtuous) conclusions by various
means, including rational agenda-following, noetic insight, trial
and error, or fiat. In fact, the "phase" of the Deweyian process
most frequently omitted was "goal-setting." Furthermore, she
concluded that people could follow a goal-seeking pattern rig-
idly and still arrive at defective (nonproductive, immoral) con-
clusions. It is reasonable to hypothesize that (1) people often do
not have goals; (2) if they do, they may not be aware of them and
(3) even if they are aware of them, they do not become conscious
factors in decision making.
According to my experience after 44 years of teaching deci-
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1 25
Commentary /Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
sion making in the classroom, the typical student finds it difficult
to grasp the concept of "goal" and often cannot distinguish
between a goal and a solution. Teaching goal setting is the most
difficult aspect of teaching decision making. Baron cites altruism
and self-interest as the sources of goals and includes keeping the
status quo, compensation, punishment/deterrence, resistance,
and fairness as bases for nonconsequentialist thinking.
I would offer two other possible reasons for deviation from the
consequentialist premise. First would be the requirement to
adhere to a decision-making system in which decision makers,
having no stake in the outcome, confuse following a formal
agenda with a goal and evaluate their success by their adherence
to the agenda. Second would be a case in which a decision maker
is confronted with alternatives that have no possible desirable
outcome but where a decision must be made anyway. We should
take note here that Freud's premise that there is no behavior
that is not goal-directed (1961) leads to the generalization that
individuals and groups who are engaged in problem solving have
goals whether they are aware of them or not. Furthermore, in
the case of group problem solving, in any case, the group goal
can conflict with individual goals.
Agenda as goal, PERT/CPM (Federal Electric Corporation
1963) is a management decision-making device that requires the
decision makers to accept an outcome mandated by a higher
authority and not necessarily known to the decision makers. The
decision makers are to plan to achieve the outcome through a
program of steps that adhere to the "system." Because the
decision makers have no say in specifying the outcome, their
personal attitudes are irrelevant. And because their job perfor-
mance is evaluated on whether their plan achieves the outcome,
their only choice is to "go by the book." An example of what can
happen in such a model can be found in the story of glitches
encountered in the assembly of the Polaris missile in the late
1950s (Phillips 1966).
No goal Is acceptable. The dilemma of facing two unaccept-
able choices, referred to as "khulyages" by Phillips (New York
Times, 1969), may be illustrated by arriving at a cafeteria and
discovering that the only dinner choices are tuna casserole and
corn fritters. On a more serious note, most medical decisions fall
into the khulyages model. A person with blocked coronary
arteries is often faced with a decision based on the following
premises (alternatives drawn from Hurst 1990): In every case, to
achieve an outcome, drastic life-style modifications including no
smoking, change in diet, lipid management, and stress reduc-
tion must be undertaken: (1) Percutaneous coronary angioplasty
is a relatively noninvasive way of opening blocked arteries, but
almost 10% of such procedures result in emergency coronary
artery bypass and roughly 40% of such procedures fail in about a
year, requiring another decision. (2) Coronary artery bypass
graft (CABG) is an invasive procedure involving considerable
risk and pain with a manifest morbidity and mortality rate.
Furthermore, there is no guarantee that the outcome would be
superior to medical treatment, except in the particular case of
proximal left main occlusion, in which CABG is the only life-
saving alternative. (3) Living with limitations in life style is
required and symptoms are managed by drugs, all of which have
unpleasant side effects. (4) Doing nothing virtually guarantees
progression to a terminal state (unless there is some sort of
divine intervention, a circumstance not noted in most text-
books).
One might argue that the patient chooses the lesser of the
evils. The problem, however, is that quality of outcome can
never be assessed in advance, because it is impossible to
engineer a case comparison with an "n" = 1. Once the decision is
made and executed, the status of the patient is forever altered,
and any further remedies depend on the altered state and have
no relevance to the original state in which the decision was
made. For example, a person may have a failed bypass and then
go on medical treatment and then be offered a "chance" for
another bypass. The circumstances of the second bypass are
26 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
considerably different from those of the first, facing the person
with another "khulyages" dilemma. Medical decision making
often appears rational because it follows a logical process (Weed
1991); to the ultimate decision maker, however, there is no
rationality because virtually all available choices are unac-
ceptable.
These two examples illustrate situations where consequen-
tialism, as defined by Baron, does not seem to apply. There may
be goals implicit in each of the preceding circumstances, but
they are goals that cannot be acknowledged by the decision
maker.
This raises the possibility that even in cases clearly within the
boundaries of consequentialism, the assumption that decision
makers will (1) have goals, (2) know what their goals are, and (3)
take those goals into account consciously during decision mak-
ing, clearly begs the question.
A "should" too many
Paul M. Pietroski
Department of Philosophy, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
H3A2T7
Electronic mall: paul@philo.mcgill.ca
Because the many senses of "should" are (somehow) related, it is
easy to vacillate between different normative claims. I think
Baron has done this, leaving his model without any clear theo-
retical function.
Many normative claims are instrumental - "you should use
salt to remove wine stains." Often, these are elliptical for claims
about desires - you should use salt if you want to remove the
stain. But desires can conflict. You may want the salt for the
soup. So we often use "should" in the following "pragmatic"
sense: agents should make those decisions that, all things
considered, they think will satisfy their desires on the whole.
Agents typically do what they should in this sense. But whereas
the normative thesis is tautologous on the pragmatic reading of
"should," it is implausible on other - for example, moral -
readings. Baron holds that agents should make those choices
that, all things considered, they expect to maximize goal
achievement. But they are to consider goal achievement across
individuals. So the same set of desires - perhaps with agents
giving their own desires special weight - provides the standard
for how all agents should (in Barons sense) decide. The descrip-
tive version of this claim is not obvious. And as a moral thesis,
Baron's consequentialism would be a crude version of utilitari-
anism that faces familiar objections (see Brink [1989] for discus-
sion and a more plausible utilitarianism).
I make these mundane points to avoid interpretations that
render Barons thesis tautologous or crude. But the attractions of
his model may result from the slogan, "Decisions should maxi-
mize the good." Given the pragmatic sense of "should" and
letting the good be that which a given agent desires, this slogan
is trivial. Given a moral sense of "should," there nwy be a sense
of "good" that preserves the slogan. But Baron has defined
another sense of "good," and thus "should." The suggestion that
talk of such normativity is illuminating might be understood by
taking the term "model" seriously. For there is a "should" of
idealization.
In applying the ideal gas law, we ignore certain facts about
molecules - that they take up space (thus decreasing the
container's volume) and have charge (and thus attract one
another, decreasing the pressure on the container). And we
speak of actual gas samples "deviating from the ideal." The
charge of a body also counts as "interference" when applying the
law of gravity (together with F = MA). But when applying
Coulomb's Law, charge is what matters; and gravitational forces
can be said to "distort" electromagnetic fields. Roughly put,

given the generalization, "Other things being equal, if A then B,
"B should (in this sense) occur ifA does. I suspect that something
like this grounds (legitimate) talk of competence/performance
distinctions, and "mistaken inferences" in cases of visual il-
lusion.
So perhaps Baron is offering a competence model, according
to which agents reason consequentially, other things being
equal. If I can preserve one life or five, other things being equal,
I will indeed preserve five. And some nonconsequentialist
commitments (e.g., caring about act/omission distinctions) may
well result from overgeneralization. But Baron provides no
evidence for holding that our decision-making competence is
monoprincipled. It seems that, other things being equal, I will
not knowingly violate another person's rights. Saying how
agents balance such commitments is hard. To take a much
discussed example, it seems (1) permissible to divert a runaway
trolley from a track occupied by five people onto a track occu-
pied by one, but (2) impermissible to remove someone's organs
to save five needy patients (for discussion see Thomson 1990).
The latter belief is "nonideal" given the consequentialist gener-
alization; and given the rights generalization, the former belief
is "distorted." A model that rejected all consequentialist reason-
ing as overgeneralization would be implausible: caring about
consequences seems to be a deep part of our decision-making
competence. But just as physicists allow for mass and change,
psychologists can go beyond "rabid-rights" and "rabid-
consequentialist" models. (In Pietroski [1993], I discuss ideali-
zation and its relevance for moral reasoning at length.)
We might reject the beliefs delivered - even under ideal
conditions - by a given competence. Our "snap judgments"
about probabilities may provide examples; although I do not see
how such "external" standards could be justified without appeals
to reflective equilibrium. Of course, given Baron's model, non-
consequentialist arguments are "fallacious" (in his nontechnical
sense). But given an alternative model - such as Rawls (1971) -
according to which decisions should maximize (rational) desire
satisfaction subject to various constraints, some utilitarian argu-
ments are unsound. So we want (1) evidence for particular
competence models, and (2) justifications for any "competence-
external" standards. But if these are goals, Baron does not offer
an advance over Mill (1861). Moreover, Rawls has a detailed
theory, not just a "suggestive" analogy.
Finally, it is of practical importance that some decisions
should be made in the idealization, but not pragmatic sense (or
vice versa). But the only other sense of "should" relevant to
public policy that I can think of is moral. And again, we do not
want Baron's consequentialism for our moral theory. It would,
for example, justify keeping some ignorant and coercing others
into consequentialism, if that would satisfy our collective goals
better than (our current practice of) offering courses that merely
require students to apply consequentialist reasoning; and con-
siderations ofjustice or individual rights would be irrelevant. So
I am left wondering what Baron takes the point of his normative
model to be, and what kind of norm he has in mind.
Broadening the base for bringing cognitive
psychology to bear on ethics
Peter Railton
Department of Philosophy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Ml 48109
Electronic mail: peter— railton(3mm.cc.umich.edu
Consequentialism has always had a somewhat uneasy relation
with commonsense morality. Impressed with the role of igno-
rance, prejudice, power, and privilege in shaping actual social
norms and institutions, the first consequentialists - utilitarians -
were led to advocate significant reform of commonsense theory
and practice. By contrast, modern consequentialists have often
Commentary/Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
sought to accommodate central elements of commonsense mo-
rality - rights, deserts, personal prerogatives, and so on - to
increase their theory's intuitive acceptability (notable excep-
tions are Kagan 1989; Singer 1972).
Baron enters into this dialectic with an important though still
developing point: at least some of the distinctively nonconse-
quentialist features of commonsense morality may be attribut-
able to cognitive heuristics and biases that are familiar from a
wide range of nonmoral judgments where few would be pre-
pared systematically to defend them. This opens up the possi-
bility of questioning on principled grounds whether consequen-
tialism is to be criticized or congratulated for failing to capture
certain aspects of moral common sense. We might adapt this
point for somewhat wider purposes by saying that recent work in
cognitive psychology bears on ethics in a number of ways.
Heuristics, framing effects, and so forth lead not only to noncon-
sequentialist reasoning but also to poor consequentialist reason-
ing. "Accommodationist' consequentialist defenses of a failing-
to-help/actively harming distinction, for example, often place
much greater weight on (salient) "out of pocket" costs than on
(less salient) opportunity costs.
To what extent is commonplace morality nonconsequential-
ist? Baron seems to conclude that nonconsequentialist thinking
is involved when his subjects appeal to considerations of fairness
or rights to explain why they would, for example, vote against a
particular law that they also admit would do more good than
harm. He notes that few, if any, attempt to give any distinctively
consequentialist arguments at this point, such as appeals to
precedent effects. Yet my experience as a teacher of introduc-
tory ethics suggests that even theoretically naive individuals
often appeal to (broadly) consequentialist considerations when
asked what rights there are, how to set a standard of fairness, or
why fairness and rights matter. Thus, students who express firm
support for Locke's doctrine of natural property rights also
typically seize on "invisible hand" arguments that purport to
show the system of private property and exchange to have the
best consequences overall. One picture this suggests: common
sense embraces certain "meta-rules " — "Do not accept rules that
violate rights," "Require rules to be fair," and so on - and then
uses these to assess more specific rules. Thus, a high tax on
gasoline might be rejected as unfair - despite doing more good
than harm "by itself." This could simply reflect a higher-order
application of indirect consequentialist thinking: a polity in
which unfair individual rules would be accepted whenever they
would yield a net benefit might as a polity realize less overall
good in the long run than one in which there was strong
resistance to unfair rules. It would perhaps be interesting to test
experimentally whether such consequentialist justifications of
meta-rules would be widely embraced. (Such a justification is
distinct from - though it often occurs in the company of- claims
about precedent, for precedent arguments attribute remoter
effects to particular rules, purportedly showing that a particular
rule is not, on balance, beneficial after all.)
As someone of consequentialist leanings, I welcome Baron's
research. I would urge, however, that he see his contribution to
moral theory as depending on less controversial assumptions.
Three examples follow.
First, he might want to reconsider his objections to Rawlsian
methods. It is customary to distinguish wide and narrow Rawls-
ian reflective equilibrium, as in Daniels (1979). Baron properly
views narrow reflective equilibrium - "systematizing] intu-
itions into a coherent theory" - as incomplete. But in wide
reflective equilibrium we expose our moral judgments not only
to other moral judgments and principles but to broader coher-
ence tests in which we invoke other norms (e.g., epistemic
norms), going empirical theories (e.g., psychology), and what-
ever insights philosophical investigation might afford us (e.g.,
into the nature of persons). It seems to me that one could recast
Baron's argument as being for a potentially very plausible piece
of wide reflective equilibrium: given what we can now see about
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1 27
Commentary/Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
the psychological mechanisms (according to our going empirical
theory) underlying certain judgments, we are less inclined
(given prevailing epistemic norms) to take these judgments at
face value, and more inclined to subject them, and moral
opinions that depend more or less directly upon them, to critical
(philosophical) scrutiny.
Second, Baron may wish to build from a broader normative
base because it is doubtful whether his claim that "our goals give
us reason to endorse consequentialism as a standard of decision
making" can be fully sustained. Early on, he claims to restrict his
discussion to examples where the "appropriate balance of goals
of self versus others . . . does not arise," but this leaves a reduced
domain for ethics, and within a few pages he is discussing
"omission and status-quo bias," which, given the uneven state of
the status quo, may reflect strong conflicts of self versus others.
Baron himself mentions as examples "failure to consider aiding
the world's poor" and leading "lives of leisure" when we are
capable of doing more for others.
Third, Baron advances a very strong thesis, one roughly to the
effect that all legitimate critical reflection on norms must be
consequentialist: "we should endorse norms that help us achieve
our goals . . . because we have no other reasons for endorsing
norms." But a long philosophical tradition, associated with but
hardly limited to Kantians, suggests that there might be reasons
for endorsing norms that are prior to, or that stand on different
ground from, goal achievement. Baron's work remains relevant,
however, because almost every moral theory - indeed, almost
every theory of practical reasons - gives a crucial role to goals
and their achievement.
Can goals be uniquely defined?
liana Rltov
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Ben-Gurion
University, 84105 Be'er Sheva, Israel
Electronic mail: ritov@vms.bgu.ac.il
A coherent comprehensive model serves both to organize exist-
ing knowledge and to spur new research. In behavioral decision
making, expected utility theory, a normative model, serves as a
yardstick for actual decisions. Although the validity of expected
utility as a descriptive model has been largely discredited,
behavioral decision-making research could not have advanced as
it has without this model.
Consequentialism, as presented in the target article, is a
wider, more general principle than expected utility. According
to this principle, decisions should be based on evaluating ex-
pected consequences with respect to goal achievement. For
example, the goal of "living" would best be served by reducing
the overall risk of death, even if this aim could only be achieved
by introducing some new risk (such as the one associated with
vaccines). This general normative principle provides an impor-
tant basis for testing people's decisions on different problems,
such as the provision of compensation and punishment, and the
acceptance of social reforms.
The simple form of consequentialism does not specify con-
straints concerning goals or people's preference ordering among
states of the world, as reflected in their judgment of conse-
quences. The general nature of the model, as presented by
Baron, has the advantage of providing a single principle applica-
ble to a wide range of decisions. As a prescriptive model,
however, the version of consequentialism presented in the
target article may encounter some difficulties involving the
underlying assumption that goals can be unambiguously defined
and that consequences have some absolute and objective value
vis-a-vis those goals. I will argue that this assumption is not
straightforward and can be called into question.
What is the relevant goal one should consider when choosing
28 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
between two bets? Rational economic theory would dictate
maximizing the subjective utility of wealth as the only relevant
goal. Thus, the gamble that will yield higher expected gain
should be preferred. Nevertheless, one can conceive of other
goals, such as psychological "well-being" that may also pertain to
this choice. If goals such as "increasing satisfaction" or "minimiz-
ing regret" are allowed, the best consequences may be achieved
by choosing the "safer" alternative rather than the one with the
"higher expected gain." Indeed, research shows that subjects
often prefer the safer bet over the one with higher expected
value. This preference may reverse when the bets are evaluated
separately in a pricing task or even compared to each other in a
matching task (Slovic & Lichtenstein 1983; Tversky et al. 1988).
Preference reversals of this kind are a paramount example of the
distinction between evaluating consequences as judged in mak-
ing a decision and in the absence of a decision. However, they
could also raise the question whether the very goals one con-
siders, or should consider, depend on whether a decision has to
be made.
If people's emotions are weighed in evaluating consequences
then it becomes relevant to compare their feelings as they
experience the consequences of each alternative. In direct
judgment of emotions following resolution of uncertainty, we
found that acts leading to the worse outcome produced bad
feelings more than omissions leading to the worse outcome,
regardless of whether the two outcomes were gains or losses,
relative to the status quo (Baron & Ritov, in press). Expectations
concerning such ex post facto feelings may be taken into account
in evaluating the consequences of acts versus omissions with
respect to the goal of "minimizing regret. " The finding that
judgments about emotion and the advisability of the options
reveal the same pattern of omission bias is compatible with this
hypothesis.
In the examples I have mentioned so far, the decisions
concerned only the decision maker's self-interest. Thus, the
simple golden rule of choosing the option that is most likely to
achieve the goals of the person whom the decision concerns does
not solve the problem for those decisions. In fact, the same
argument may be raised with respect to decisions concerning
others. Even if the decision maker has in mind the best interest
of the person the decision concerns, he can still have a complex
idea of what this person's goals are. In the vaccination case
discussed in the target article it is natural to assume that from
the child's perspective, reduced risk of death, no matter how it is
achieved, will serve the goal of living. Presumably, in comparing
the state, "the child died from the flu" to the state, "the child
died from the vaccine," the emotions of the child cannot be
taken as a differentiating factor. However, if the disease and the
vaccine involved risks of some disablement rather than death
the child might care whether she became disabled from the
disease or the vaccine.
Even the goal of "living" is not as simple as it may appear. In
the "Asian disease" problem of Tversky and Kahneman (1981),
the framing of the goal affected subjects' preference between
two given options. When the options were described in terms of
saving lives, the certainty alternative was preferred. When the
same options were described in terms of the number of expected
deaths, the riskier alternative was preferred. A similar framing
manipulation affected subjects' preference between risk-
reduction options in situations with multiple life-threatening
risks (Ritov et al. 1993). When the options were described using
the "lives saved" frame, the majority of subjects preferred equal
reduction of all risks over a reduction in a single risk, achieving
the same overall reduction. In the "expected deaths" frame,
most subjects showed no preference for either of the two
options. Thus, the framing of the goal as "saving lives" or
"reducing deaths" affects people's judgment as to which course
of action yields the best consequences.
I do not want to imply that framing effects of the kind
described here are normatively justifiable. Indeed, changes of

preference caused solely by the difference in description of the
very same options are clear manifestations of nonnormative
behavior. However, these findings raise some questions as to the
prescriptive value of a simple form of consequentialism. It may
be necessary to develop a more constrained version of the model
if it is to fulfill its prescriptive purpose.
Goals, values and benefits
Frederic Schick
Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903
Baron reports studies of decision making that testify to a neglect
of the consequences, and he proposes an explanation. He holds
that decisions are "nonconsequentialist" when people misapply
goal-seeking norms. The goals being sought are believed by
these people to promote some more basic goals, but that
connection then fails. I think too much can be made of this. The
goals people have are rarely connected in this purposive way,
and 1 doubt they are so connected in all the cases to which Baron
refers.
Take his discussion of resistance to a coerced, uneven reform:
people sometimes resist because they care about fairness or
because they take the coercion to be a violation of rights. Baron
considers this "nonconsequential" because, by assumption, it
opposes reform: people would be better off, though some better
off than others. But on whose evaluation? Those who have a goal
of fairness may rate an outcome of unfairness low, and those who
care about rights may set a low value on an outcome of a rights
violation. Coals, after all, according to Baron, are "criteria by
which people evaluate states of affairs."
Baron assumes that the goals of fairness and rights are purpos-
ive only, that people care about fairness and rights because they
think (in the present case, falsely) that they serve the general
welfare, this being the ultimate goal here. He holds that none
but ultimate goals function as standards of value. Still, he offers
no grounds for supposing that fairness and rights are purposive
only. Judging informally, by what people say, fairness and rights
goals are often ultimate, and philosophers who consider them
ultimate find a large, approving public. (On fairness as ultimate,
see Rawls 1971; on rights as ultimate, see Dworkin 1977; Nozick
1974.)
This is also true of the other issues addressed. On punish-
ment: Why suppose that retribution is meant to be serving
deterrence, that, for most people, a goal of retribution is
purposive rather than ultimate? Baron says only that it could be
purposive, but this alone does not warrant the judgment that,
when it is not deterrent, retribution is foolish. On active eutha-
nasia: Why suppose that opposing this is a misguided harm-
prevention, that people oppose it because they believe that
killing causes harm? Why assume that preventing harm is their
ultimate goal here? Most people have more specific values.
They are opposed to mercy killing because it is a killing.
Baron goes beyond the point about some goals being purpos-
ive only and not connecting with their purposes. He suggests,
more broadly, that goals and norms sometimes fail to be rational.
What norms we should follow - what goals we should have -
must go by the consequences. Baron notes that this can be
tricky. We cannot judge the norms we might follow by whether
our following them would advance our goals; that would be
begging the question. Our goals (and norms) must be set aside,
and we must reason in terms of what is left. But with our goals set
aside, how could we reason at all? On what basis could we then
say how good or bad the consequences are?
There is no neutral ground. Baron refers to preventing acci-
dents, lowering the death rate, diminishing costs - to ways of
preventing harm and of promoting benefits. But this still begs
the question. We are asking what norms to follow; whether to
Commentary/Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
pursue the prevention of harm and the promotion of benefits,
however these are distributed (and whatever rights are overrid-
den, etc.); or perhaps to pursue instead some trade-off of benefit
and fairness, and so forth, a trade-off that sometimes might call
for resisting that which promotes the most benefit. Preventing
harm and promoting benefit is the old utilitarian goal, and we
can not appeal to that here. Whether a norm would advance that
goal can not be made decisive for us, for that would beg the
question of what goals we should have - what norms we should
follow.
This leads to a final comment. The studies Baron cites do not
prove what they claim. They show that people's norms and
decisions are often not utilitarian, that people often govern
themselves by nonutilitarian norms. They do not establish that
people's choices are ever nonconsequentialist. Utilitarianism
calls for choosing whatever results in the biggest aggregate
benefit. Consequentialism calls for choosing so that we get the
best results - best in our own valuation, whatever that may be -
and this allows for many choices a utilitarian has to reject. (I
expand on the open-endedness of consequentialism in Schick
1991, pp. 121-45.) Utilitarianism is not a logic. It is a theory of
value, a special additive ethic: it tells us to go by benefit sums.
Why should people with different ethics be said to be thinking
carelessly? Or rather, why should anyone who is not a utilitarian
fault how these people think?
What goals are to count?
Mark D. Spranca
Department of Psychology, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley,
CA 94720
Electronic mail: spranca@garnet.berkeley.edu
Jonathan Baron addresses a set of issues of immense importance
to philosophers, psychologists, economists, educators, parents,
and policy makers. How should people make decisions? How do
people make decisions? And what should be done about depar-
tures from normativity? Having read Baron's two books on these
topics, which I highly recommend to the reader wanting a more
complete treatment, I think he presents a strong case for the
appropriateness of consequentialism as a normative benchmark
and the occurrence of nonconsequentialist decisions (Baron
1988a; 1993a). I would, however, like to raise a few concerns
about his normative theory and point out a few of its understated
strengths.
Does consequentialism have anything to say about what goals
one should have? This is a difficult but crucial issue for Baron's
theory to address. If consequentialism respects individual dif-
ferences in goals, it would seem to prescribe and laud actions as
different as Hitler's and Mother Theresa's. If, on the other hand,
it allows only certain goals, it would seem to change the focus of
the theory from rationality to morality. (Perhaps Baron can
discuss whether he is offering a theory of morality or rationality
[or both] in the course of answering this question.) Whichever
claim Baron is making seems to be unsatisfactory. The first trou-
bles anyone for obvious reasons. The second seems to require
Baron to specify what goals people should and should not have, a
liberty most people would be unwilling to relinquish.
There is a possible way out of this dilemma. Trying to achieve
a goal affects the achievement both of one's own other goals and
of other people's goals. Goals can be analyzed and evaluated in
terms of their consequences for the achievement of these other
goals. Goals are disallowed (by consequentialism) to the extent
that they prevent more than they promote individual and
collective goal achievement. Compared to moral goals, immoral
goals probably fare poorly because they interfere with the goals
of other people and often lead to negative outcomes for the actor
(e.g., guilt, embarrassment, punishment).
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1 29
Commentary/Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
Baron would like to remedy the nonconsequentialist thinking
he describes. I would, too, but I am concerned that we presently
lack knowledge of which errors are worth correcting and which
are not. (For a fuller discussion of normative and descriptive
considerations bearing on the interpretation of departures from
normativity, see Spranca 1993.) In deciding which new thinking
strategies to teach students and children, two general kinds of
errors are possible: we can worsen thinking or fail to improve it.
To maximize the ratio of good (correcting the errors worth
correcting and not correcting those not worth correcting) to bad
teaching decisions requires a long and careful program of re-
search devoted to measuring the consequences of learning and
using various thinking strategies. Baron acknowledges the risks
of educational reform but is quick to point out that not reforming
has consequences as well. Baron seems to be advocating cau-
tious change. What I would like to see before any changes are
made are large-scale experiments in the schools manipulating
the thinking strategies taught and measuring the time, effort,
and money to learn and use them and also the consequences of
using them for goal achievement. That way a reform is more
likely to succeed and social scientists are less likely to jeopardize
their future status and funding (by having promoted a misguided
reform).
Having stated some concerns I consider important, I would
like to close with two points. First, I think Baron's concise
statement and defense of consequentialism is much more so-
phisticated and comprehensive than a first reading would sug-
gest. I think the concerns I have raised and those I expect to read
from other commentators are addressed or addressable by
Baron's formulation of consequentialism. I expect that Baron's
reply will make this obvious as his latest book (1993a) certainly
does. Although I see this as a strength, Baron might want to
respond to those who are wary of a theory seemingly immune to
attack. And he might want to put this in the context of a
discussion of the criteria by which normative theories should be
evaluated.
Second, Baron sets an important example when he justifies
his normative theory in terms of goal achievement. In seeking a
justification, I think Baron correctly asks what the purpose of a
normative theory is. Although some may disagree that its
purpose is to achieve the goals of people, it is clearly not to reach
consensus or to be consistent with intuition. Yet readers are
often given no other reason to accept a normative theory. Baron
moves the validation of normative theories in the right
direction.
Actions, inactions and the temporal
dimension
Karl Halvor Teigen
Department of Psychology, University of Tromso, 9037 Tromse, Norway
Electronic mail: kahht@psyk.uit.no
There is more to actions (as well as inactions) than meets the eye.
They are undertaken, more or less successfully, because they
are believed to fit somehow into a bigger scheme of things. They
may match my past, my present, and my future.
Acts matching a person's present state are sometimes referred
to as "spontaneous," "emotional," or "intrinsically motivated."
Sometimes they are criticized for being shortsighted or irre-
sponsible and other times they are hailed for being more
"authentic" than actions performed routinely or with an eye on
the outcome.
Acts matching a person's past have similarly been evaluated
positively as "principled" and "consistent," or negatively (as in
the target article), evidencing a "status-quo bias."
Finally, actions designed to match an imagined future can be
described positively as "goal-directed' and "instrumental," or
30 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
negatively as "calculating" or "opportunistic" (the end justifies
the means).
I am not completely happy with the concept of consequential-
ism because of the inherent ambiguity of the term. On one hand,
it is used to characterize an almost unassailable position,
namely, that one should prefer acts (or nonactions) successfully
matching the states one wants to maintain, develop, or achieve,
above those having less successful consequences. So, for exam-
ple, it would be better to spend my money now than to invest it if
I honestly value present enjoyment over future savings. Per-
haps, in this sense, we should speak of the functions of an action
rather than its consequences.
On the other hand, the term "consequences" seems to point
to the future rather than the present (or past) as the proper
yardstick for evaluating decisions. This is also in line with most
examples given in Baron's article. But today's future is tomor-
row's present (and next week's past), making a consistent futur-
ism logically untenable unless we are to engage in a never-
ending regress (or should we rather say progress?) of means
justifying means justifying means.
The issue is further complicated by a failure to distinguish
between future goals and future effects (e.g., unintended side
effects and long-term effects of a particular action). Baron de-
fines goals as "criteria by which people evaluate states of affairs."
This definition is too wide; I think it is more fruitful to limit the
goal concept to states of affairs people actively strive for, that is,
those that explicitly motivate their actions. But then we very
often discover that the attained goal state is not necessarily as
blissful as it was supposed to be, or that other, nonintended
effects prevent us from enjoying it fully. A common source of
"irrational" decisions is precisely this preference for acts that
seem to bring us closer to a goal, with too little regard for other,
foreseeable (but not targeted) effects; like the proverbial doctor
who tried to cure a fever, with eventual success, but killed the
patient in the process.
My suggestion then, is to make the concept of consequential-
ism more fruitful by distinguishing its logical and psychological
aspects, and as a first approximation, distinguishing the ex-
pected function of an act (as fulfilling one's past, present, and
future), its goals, and its foreseeable effects.
Baron's prime example of nonconsequentialist thinking is the
omission/commission asymmetry. When otherwise compara-
ble, such as when leading to similar outcomes, nonactions are
judged more leniently than actions. The problem is that they
rarely are comparable. For one thing (not discussed in the target
article) commissions usually take place at a definite point in
time, whereas omissions are more difficult to pinpoint. I can
regret not having vaccinated my child, but should I regret not
having done it this week, or the week before, or last month?
Obviously, there is a diffusion of responsibility at work, not over
people but over time, leaving the nonactor essentially blameless
on any particular date. Now blame, as well as credit, are
obviously factors that the sophisticated consequentialist should
take into account. The circularity is apparent: if unsuccessful
omissions give rise to less blame, by self and others, than equally
unsuccessful commissions, then by definition, the omission is
not equally unsuccessful after all.
It is interesting that most discussions of the omission/
commission asymmetry are concerned with failures. What about
successes? People are credited and congratulated for their
actions, but how often are they so rewarded for their timely
nonactions? Some of us may remember occasions on which we
were thanked for keeping our mouths shut, but only after
opening them several times before closing them again; more-
over, these are not necessarily the proudest moments in our
lives.
Again, one of the reasons for this possible asymmetry con-
cerns time. A laudable inaction can rarely be rushed. Marital
fidelity, the nondisclosure of secrets, incorruptibility, nonsmok-
ing, and similar feats of abstinence are virtues that take time to

unfold to their advantage, and will, as a consequence, not always
reap their rewards fully in this life (but, as every true consequen-
tialist knows, surely in the hereafter).
As a final recommendation, I suggest that the author take
advantage of this and other commentaries as material for an
unobtrusive test of the omission bias. How many contain criti-
cisms of what he has written (but should not) versus what he has
omitted to mention (but should have)? And what about the
distribution of credits? Because I am by now painfully aware of
my own irrationality I will hasten to set the record straight by
thanking Baron for some successful omissions, such as his not
being boring, not presenting an endless list of empirical work,
not settling all problems beforehand so there is nothing to
discuss, and not being afraid of drawing a moral, at the risk of
being perceived as a kind of psychological missionary, or omis-
sionary, as the case may be.
The consequences of taking
consequentialism seriously
Philip E. Tetlock
Institute of Personality and Social Research, 2150 Kittredge, Berkeley, CA
94720
Electronic mall: ipsr@uclink.berkeley.edu
Baron advances and defends a deceptively simple normative
model, which asserts that "the best decisions are those that yield
the best consequences for achieving people's goals. ' Goals are
simply the criteria by which people evaluate states of the world
as more or less satisfactory (e.g., attaining financial security,
attracting a mate, ethnic cleansing of a community). Baron
maintains that "we have reason to be disturbed, prima facie,
when we find others making decisions that violate consequen-
tialism." In this view, we should be disturbed because people
are choosing alternatives that do not satisfy their goals as
effectively as other alternatives could.
Baron identifies a variety of findings suggesting that "noncon-
sequentialist thinking exists and matters, even if each example is
subject to one quibble or another." However, in the absence of
an exhaustive list of the goals people are trying to attain in
making judgments and choices, it is difficult to say whether
Baron has conclusively ruled out all viable consequentialist
counterinterpretations and premature to dismiss the counterin-
terpretations as "quibbles." Consider, for example, the intrigu-
ing work of Ritov and Baron (1990) on vaccination decisions.
They asked subjects to indicate the maximum overall death rate
for vaccinated children at which they would still be willing to
vaccinate their own children. Subjects were willing to vaccinate
their children when they believed that they had a 10 out of
10,000 chance of death from a flu epidemic, that a vaccine could
prevent the flu, and that the vaccine could kill some small
number of children; the mean tolerable risk was about 5 out of
10,000, half the risk of the illness itself. In effect, subjects were
willing to double the odds of their children dying. The same
result holds up .when subjects role-play a policy maker who is
supposed to decide whether children in general should be
vaccinated. When Baron asked subjects for justifications, they
often responded that they would be responsible for any deaths
caused by the vaccine, but they would not be as responsible for
deaths caused by failure to vaccinate. I am puzzled by why the
desire to avoid or deflect responsibility for a controversial
decision does not count as a legitimate goal in a consequentialist
analysis. Might not subjects have reasoned in consequentialist
style that a 5/10,000 increment in the probability of a child's
death is a reasonable price to pay for minimizing anticipatory
regret and social censure? Or should the decision analyst try to
persuade people that the differential regret they (and their
evaluators) feel from bad consequences stemming from omis-
Commentary /Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
sion versus commission is a by-product of cognitive bias (and
hence does not count as a legitimate goal for guiding action)?
More generally, when are Baron-style consequentialists content
with simply helping people choose more effective means for
achieving their goals (no matter how illogical or immoral they
may be) and when do they take on the more ambitious task of
instructing people on the wrong-headedness of the goals them-
selves? Is a sharp distinction between cognitive means and
motivational ends viable here?
It should be emphasized that I do not question the empirical
robustness of the finding Baron reports here. Indeed, in my own
work (Tetlock 1992; Tetlock & Boettger 1993), I have asked
subjects to role-play Food and Drug Administration regulators
whose task is to decide on the admissibility of an anticoagulant
drug into the U.S. pharmaceuticals market. When considering a
drug that is not already on the market (a non-status-quo option),
the drug must save at least twice as many lives as it endangers.
Moreover, this effect is amplified when subjects are under
pressure of accountability and are expected to justify their
decisions to others (here, the necessary ratio of lives saved to
lives endangered sometimes rises as high as 9 to 1). We also find
that accountable subjects confronted by a non-status-quo drug
that will harm some people (although it will benefit many more)
look for ways to avoid making the decision, such as buck-passing
(referring the decision to another government agency) and
procrastination (delay the decision until more evidence is at
hand). Anticipatory regret and blame avoidance are powerful
social-political motives and it seems peculiar for a consequen-
tialist analysis to leave them out.
One can also advance consequentialist counterinterpretations
for many of the other effects Baron discusses. Consider, for
example, compensation decisions for victims of various misfor-
tunes. Subjects give more money to victims of train accidents
when the train's unexpected failure to stop in front of a fallen
tree causes the injury than when the suddenness of the stop was
the cause. Or subjects give more compensation when they
believe an injury has been caused by human beings than when
they believe it was caused by nature. Baron suspects that such
effects are
an overgeneralization of the desire to punish someone. . . .
This sort of reasoning might account in part for the general lack
of concern about the discrepancy between victims of natural
disease, who are rarely compensated (beyond their medical
expenses) and victims of human activity, who are often com-
pensated a great deal, even when little specific deterrence
results because compensation is paid by liability insurance.
A consequentialist counterinterpretation here would argue: (a)
large deterrence effects are possible because liability insurance
rates for all providers (and especially the risky providers) of the
product or service do go up in the real world when large damage
awards are granted; (b) large damage awards serve a value
expressive function (cf. Kahneman & Knetsch 1993; Katz 1960)
and give people the opportunity to wax indignant and express
their moral outrage and their moral superiority ("I am the kind of
person who is deeply offended by such conduct and to show you
how offended I am, I will impose an especially large award").
We should also examine Baron's work on resistance to coerced
reform. Baron and Jurney (1993) presented subjects with six
proposed reforms (e.g., of TV advertising in political cam-
paigns, compulsory vaccinations, 100% tax on gasoline); each
would require some government coercion to compel people to
behave "in a way that would be best for all if everyone behaved
that way." Although "most subjects thought that things would be
better on the whole if the reforms were put into effect," many
subjects still refused to vote for the reforms. Their objections fell
into the categories of "fairness, harm, and rights." Baron finds
that people are reluctant to support reforms that impose concen-
trated costs on small constituencies, reduce personal liberty, or
give a great deal of power to government regulators and agen-
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1 31
Response/Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
cies. One does not need to be a devout libertarian to wonder
whether the counterarguments that subjects advanced repre-
sent reasonable political goals that, when carefully factored into
the decision calculus, might lead reasonable people to conclude
that they would not be better off on the whole if the reforms
were implemented.
In closing, it is worth considering the policy implications of
Baron's claim that people frequently make nonconsequentialist
decisions and that we might all be better off if a wise government
(not susceptible to certain "cognitive biases") took responsibility
for making those decisions. My view is essentially this: I am still
not persuaded that Baron has successfully eliminated conse-
quentialist explanations for the many examples of nonconse-
quentialist thinking he cites (although he has assembled a
fascinating array of effects). I also believe that there are compel-
ling political, psychological, and historical reasons for fearing
the consequences of transferring responsibility for many per-
sonal decisions to the state. The issues here are perennial ones
that revolve around the prickly principal-agent problem
(grounded in a real-world observation that when principals
delegate responsibility to agents for making decisions, agents
often try to maximize their own values rather than those of the
principals). In short, I judge the psychological claim that "non-
consequentialist decisions" have been systematically docu-
mented to be premature; I judge the resistance to coerced
reform to be not a cognitive bias but a well-justified concern
(grounded in historical base rates and public choice analyses of
principal-agent paradoxes in representative democracies) that
transferring authority for personal decisions to the state fre-
quently creates more problems than it solves and can put one on
the slippery slope to tyranny.
Author's Response
Normative, descriptive and prescriptive
responses
Jonathan Baron
Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
19104-6196
Electronic mail: baron@cattell.psych.upenn.edu
The target article argued that descriptive (psychological)
accounts of moral judgment are inconsistent with a conse-
quentialist normative model. The commentaries ad-
dressed the normative model, the experimental results,
and their practical (prescriptive) implications. It is gratify-
ing to see the philosophers going after the psychology and
vice versa. The answers to many commentaries can only
be sketched here. I shall refer to Hare (1981), Baron
(1993a), and other sources for more detailed discussions.
R1. Standard criticisms of utilitarianism
Several comments contained standard objections to utili-
tarianism. Although they have been answered before,
these are worth answering again. In the target article, I
did not try to defend utilitarianism, a form of consequen-
tialism that assumes that total utility is the sum (or
average) of utility across individuals. As Railton points
out, however, I assumed it at a few points despite my
claims to the contrary, so I will now come out of the closet
and admit that I endorse it. My own defense of it (Baron
1993a) draws heavily on (and assumes the conclusions of)
32 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
Hare (1981). Here, then, I will lump together the criti-
cisms of utilitarianism with those of weaker claims.
R1.1. Normative versus prescriptive. Many criticisms re-
sult from my failure to say enough about a distinction that
is really very important, that between normative and
prescriptive claims about decision making (Baron 1985;
1988a). Normative claims are those that concern the
ultimate standard by which decisions are evaluated. Pre-
scriptive claims concern the principles that people ought
to try to follow. These can differ for many reasons. For
example, surely deciding to commit adultery or to tell a
lie when under oath is sometimes the best decision in
terms of overall consequences. Yet it is probably best if we
endorse and try to follow the rules "Never commit adul-
tery" or "Never lie under oath" because, although these
rules will lead to some errors, people will make more
errors if they try to decide for themselves - often under
conditions of impaired judgment — when the conse-
quences are best.
Adler, Daniel, Fuller, Heil, and McCain are right to
point out that, in the long run, the best consequences
might result from people following nonconsequentialist
rules rather than attempting to produce the best conse-
quences in each case. It might even yield the best conse-
quences for most people not to know that they are doing
this. Thus, evidence that subjects cannot explicitly follow
a deterrent rationale for punishment is not necessarily
evidence that they are following principles they should
not follow. It is, however, pritna facie evidence of such
error. To restate my argument somewhat, we should not
simply assume that all apparent nonconsequentialist prin-
ciples are for the best. Instead, we should seek to under-
stand why they might be for the best. In the case of
adultery or lying under oath, it is easy to see why it is
probably better to endorse a blanket rule rather than
encouraging people to decide for themselves. In the case
of retribution, it is not so clear; if consequentialist justi-
fications of retributive rules begin to sound like self-
serving rationales for reflexive vengeance, perhaps that is
because they are. At some point, it may be worthwhile to
teach students that punishment can also be justified by
deterrence.l
Likewise, the principle of compensating injuries
caused by people more than those caused by nature may
not be so easy to justify, despite Adler's argument that it is
appropriate "if one is designing a general plan for com-
pensation and knows that only some of the unjustified
injuries can be compensated." Why not compensate those
cases for which compensation will help the victim most,
regardless of cause? New Zealand has recently attempted
just this sort of reform, compensating injuries through
social insurance rather than through the tort system, and
punishing responsible injurers separately. When such
reforms are realistic possibilities, people might do better
to think of the more usual strategy (linking compensation
to the cause of injury) as one possible solution among
many rather than as a fundamental moral principle that
need not be understood in terms of its consequences.
Should people know the consequentialist rationale for
the "deontological" rules that they follow? In some cases,
people may behave better if they blindly obey the rules
they are taught. A person who knows that the rule against
lying is only a means to the best consequences might be

too tempted to justify his harmful lying in that way. On the
other hand, if nobody understands the consequentialist
rationale, rules may be socially unstable. People will
demand some reason for following them other than those
provided by the endorsement of authorities (or of intu-
ition, which may express only the endorsements of now-
forgotten authorities). And if only some people know the
justification, then they must bear the cost of maintaining
their authority. Arguably, in modern democratic soci-
eties, it is too late to try to withhold from people any
justifications of the rules they are taught to follow. It is in
this context that we might be disturbed by the finding that
many subjects do not seem familiar with the deterrence
rationale for punishment.
Although people may suspect that utilitarians are more
inclined to break the rules (against lying, cheating, etc.)
than those who do not see them only as means to the
greater good, we have no evidence for such weakness. In
principle, it is possible for utilitarians to follow a rule even
while judging that it is better to break it (Railton 1984), for
example, out of a lack of trust in their own judgment. We
can even believe that our judgment is never to be trusted
in some cases (such as lying under oath or committing acts
of terrorism). Such an attitude is fully compatible with
understanding the consequentialist justification of rules
and understanding that, in strange hypothetical cases that
psychologists and philosophers may dream up, it is best to
break the rule (Baron 1988b; Hare 1981, Ch. 3). This
attitude is also compatible with the sort of "integrity"
discussed by Arkes.
McCain adds that we should respect the deep value
commitments of people who express deontological rules
and that the consequences of failing to respect these
commitments would be regrettable. In the target article
and in Baron (1993a, Ch. 8), I discuss what "respect" in
this case might mean. Stated simply (as McCain stated his
argument), we have reason to discourage people from
acting on rules that harm us. (If so-called deontological
rules really achieve the best consequences, their rules do
not harm us, and we have no reason to object.) The means
we choose to discourage such rules have consequences
themselves, however. Respecting the views of students
means both trying to understand theirs and also insisting
that they understand ours. I have argued mainly for the
latter, which I do not see as implying disrespect.
Glymour seems to think that I endorse a simple version
of egalitarian utilitarianism that requires that people care
as much for the children of others as for their own
children. I do not (Baron 1993a, pp. 91-96). Caring more
for one's own children sets a precedent for parental
responsibility, which coincides with biological motiva-
tions, so the long-run benefits of such caring may be
better (for parents as well as children) than those of
comparable efforts to care for others' children. Glymour
may think that parental responsibility is more basic than
this justification implies. Even if it has no other justifica-
tions, it might still be best for many people to believe
that.
Glymour is also bothered by the need to measure
probabilities and utilities, and by the need for interper-
sonal comparison. The latter is indeed a difficult problem,
although it is not necessarily insoluble (Baron 1993a,
pp. 78-88; Hare 1981, pp. 117-29). It is also more
ubiquitous than it seems, because many decisions involve
Response /Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
choices between alternative future selves with different
goals (Baron 1993a, pp. 45-49). Yet much of the problem
of interpersonal comparison is a matter of accuracy, like
that of assessing probabilities and utilities even for a single
individual. The normative-prescriptive distinction makes
the practical difficulties irrelevant. They matter only
prescriptively, and I have not advocated attempting to
measure probabilities and utilities in most of the cases I
discussed, which concern general principles (such as "do
no harm") that are brought to bear even after probabilities
and utilities have been measured (e.g., Deber & Goel
1990). An attack on the utility theory as a normative
principle must show that the problem is deeper and more
serious than that of assessing the brightness of a light or
the loudness of a sound (also an error-prone process).
Morton and Oatley point to the "inevitability of heuris-
tics" given the practical difficulties of utilitarian calcula-
tion. This objection does not apply to the simple conse-
quentialist model I defended in the target article, which
requires no calculation. The simple model, applied liter-
ally, could involve no more than a holistic judgment of
"which option yields the best consequences on the
whole." No analysis into individual utilities, time periods,
or uncertain states is needed. I believe that this sort of
consequentialist heuristic would agree with the conse-
quentialist option that many subjects rejected in the
experiments I review.
At issue is whether heuristics are chosen merely be-
cause they are efficient, maximizing utility because the
utility of the effort they save (over some more complex
alternative) balances the utility of the errors they cause
(relative to that alternative). I have argued that, in many
cases, some heuristics are inferior, even taking into ac-
count the cost of thinking. The prescriptively superior
heuristics might have no more cost in effort, or so little
cost that they are worth it. The simple consequentialist
heuristic just mentioned may often be one of these. Other
examples (Baron 1988a) are these: (1) to avoid the status-
quo effect, ask yourself what you would do if neither
option were the status quo; (2) to avoid the sunk-cost
effect, consider future consequences only, rather than
past expenditures. The fact that neither the endowment
effect nor the sunk-cost effect are universally found sug-
gests that many people already use these prescriptively
correct heuristics.
Phillips refers to the difficulty of predicting outcomes.
It is not clear how this difficulty justifies the nonconse-
quentialist heuristics I cited, as opposed to the alternative
of making a holistic all-things-considered judgment based
on expected consequences. 2
R1.2. Contrary intuitions. Many objections to utilitari-
anism involve examples in which it conflicts with intu-
itions. Adler cites Foot's (Thomson 1990) example of the
unwilling organ donor; Arkes cites the girl-in-the-well
example (usually attributed to Schelling); Glymour cites
the case of responsibilities toward children; and Grush
makes up an example involving experimentation on con-
temporary people to help future people.
Several replies are available (Baron 1993a, p. 14; Hare
1981, pp. 130-140; Singer 1977). First, the prima facie
utilitarian analysis might be wrong, and intuition might
be consistent with a more complete analysis. In real cases
like Grush's, the benefits are probably too uncertain, and
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1 33
Response/Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
alternatives to human experimentation are probably
available. As suggested by Baron (1993b), sacrificing a
person for organs would make everyone else afraid, and
the cost of fear and protective activity might be too great.
In the case of the girl in the well, spending the money on
more "efficient" lifesaving might not be a real option, and
spending it on the girl might be the best use of it (Baron
1993a, p. 147), especially taking into account the second-
ary effects of a decision to let the girl die on the general
level of cynicism about government. (Moreover, the real
question is not whether to try to save the girl, but when to
give up trying. Decisions about giving up are made in real
life, and resources are a consideration.)
Second, the intuitions involved might be good pre-
scriptive rules that ought to be followed in real cases like
those described, even when the cases are true exceptions.
As argued before, we may be unable to recognize excep-
tions with sufficient reliability.
Third, our intuitions might be wrong, even when they
are strong. The abortion debate, the history of slavery,
and religious conflicts all attest to the fact that opposing
intuitions can be held strongly. Strength is no guarantee
of correctness (Fischhoff et al. 1977).
These intuitive examples differ from those used in the
studies I report because little effort has been made in
stating them to ensure that the true utilitarian answer is
clear, taking all consequences into account. From a utili-
tarian perspective, the cases are insufficiently described.
R1.3. Evil desires and nonconsequentialist goals. It is
pointed out by McCain and Spranca (and possibly Phil-
lips) that consequentialism forces us to honor evil desires
or goals, such as those of the Nazis. Arkes would exclude
the satisfaction of jealousy and pettiness from his utilitar-
ian calculus. This is a general problem for consequential-
ism. Even hedonistic consequentialism must deal with
people who take pleasure in others' pain. Attempts to
restrict consequentialism to acceptable desires may be
difficult to square with any deeper justification of the
theory. My own justification, for example, stems from the
idea that we have reason to endorse principles that help
achieve our goals. These reasons apply regardless of our
goals, so any exclusion at the normative level would be
arbitrary, merely a way of tinkering with the theory to get
it to fit our intuitions.
Two main answers to this sort of objection have been
given (Baron 1993a, p. 37; Hare 1981, pp. 140-46, 177-
82). First, the principle of neglecting evil desires is a good
prescriptive one. Only rarely, outside of fantastic hypo-
thetical cases, does this principle go against utility maxi-
mization, and we ought to lack confidence in our ability to
recognize these cases. (In this regard, I believe that this
principle is like the one forbidding adultery but unlike the
principle of considering harmful omissions to be morally
neutral.) Such cases are rare, in part because the satisfac-
tion of evil desires is often not the only alternative to
doing nothing. As Hare (1981) suggests, the ancient
Romans might have been just as satisfied with chariot
races as with the torture of Christians.
Second, taking a desire into account affects its strength
in those who have it now and in those who might develop
it in the future. People have some control over the desires
they and others develop. When we ignore a desire, we
discourage its development. Normatively it might even
34 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
be best, in the long run, to punish certain desires, but
probably simple neglect is a good prescriptive rule. Like
other defenses of intuitive principles, however, both of
these arguments are contingent on the facts.
R1.4. Ecological validity. Following up this point, Ayton &
Harvey and Oatley make the important observation that
the rules we should follow depend on the facts of our
situation. This is how the normative-prescriptive distinc-
tion allows for cultural differences: these differences are
prescriptive, not normative.
Arguably, intuitive moral systems work best in inter-
personal relationships, next best in organizations, and
worst in mass political systems. Thus, ecologically, the
proportion of cases in which normative theory disagrees
with intuitive rules is smallest in cases of interpersonal
interaction, greatest in the judgments that people make
as citizens. For example, the act-omission distinction
works well in an organization with clear lines of respon-
sibility, where going out of one's way to be helpful often
amounts to stepping on the toes of the person who was
supposed to do the job. But it does not work well when it
leads to support for laws assuming that people are unwill-
ing to donate their organs after death unless they explic-
itly state that they are willing. But surely the question of
ecological validity is a matter for empirical research (de-
spite the formidable sampling problems).
A related issue is Teigen's point about correlations
among properties of options: his example is that omissions
are spread out over time but acts are not. High correla-
tions of this sort can affect the value of prescriptive rules.
The high correlation between retribution and deterrence
would make retribution a good prescriptive rule to follow,
if it were any easier. In hypothetical situations, and some
real situations (such as penalties for vaccine injuries),
these correlations are broken, and we can ask which of the
correlated factors people take to be the basis for their
judgments.
R1.5. Intuitions as method. Following Hare (1981), I have
criticized the use of intuitions as a normative theoretical
tool. Adler, Cohen, Dwyer, and Daniel either say or
imply that I use intuitions myself, so I cannot criticize
others in this way. I have used no intuitions about cases or
moral principles to defend consequentialism. When I
have used examples, they are mostly difficult ones, where
intuitions conflict. The argument against me must there-
fore be that I have sought arguments to justify consequen-
tialism because my intuitions agreed with it at the outset,
and that if I had believed something else, I would have
chosen some other normative theory as the basis for
research. For what it is worth, this is incorrect, too, but I
will spare the reader the autobiographical details. I shall
keep my intuitions to myself (unlike many writers, who
display them as primary data), except to say that I regard
them more as signposts about where to look (not always
successfully) for consequentialist arguments than any sort
of final criteria.
Cohen points out that psychologists who endorse differ-
ent normative theories will find different biases. The
enterprise I have presented is indeed dependent on a
conjunction of at least two claims: that a particular norma-
tive theory is correct and that judgments violate it. The
fact that others might not endorse consequentialism is not

in itself an argument against this enterprise or its conclu-
sions. Likewise, the fact that subjects do not endorse the
theory by which their judgments are evaluated (Evans,
Fuller) is not an argument against the theory or the
enterprise.
A deeper form of the argument is that the whole
development of consequentialism involves intuitions
about what morality is. I shall deal with this later. Here,
my concern is with intuitions about cases or moral princi-
ples. Similarly, Daniel and Frisch suggest that intuitions
about consequences are required for applications of con-
sequentialism. I would agree, in the sense that the mean-
ing of "intuition" can shade into that of "judgment" (e.g.,
about trade-offs of goals). But these are not direct judg-
ments about what is right in a given case or in general.
And the consequentialist theory does not require intu-
ition to judge what counts as a consequence; it can, for
example, specify goal achievement as a criterion of what
counts.
Adler argues that a theory can be testable against
intuitions as data. I agree, but I suggest that moral
theories derived from intuition are psychological, de-
scriptive theories rather than normative ones. Even when
conflicts among intuitions are removed by modifying the
theory, as Adler suggests, the theory becomes a kind of
deep-structure model, in which it is assumed that con-
flicts arise from translation into surface structure. We can
still ask where the normative status of this theory comes
from, that is, why we should endorse it as an evaluation
standard. Different deep-structure models may hold for
different individuals, cultures, or historical periods. It is
true, as Adler argues, that giving up intuition as a crite-
rion requires that some other kind of argument be made
in its place. The norm-endorsement argument (Baron
1930, pp. 17-31) is intended for this purpose, and other
arguments (usually very similar ones, such as contractual-
ist arguments) have been used for the same purpose.
Dwyer and Railton ask for a more sympathetic account
of the possible role of intuitions in "broad reflective
equilibrium." I admit that I am opposed primarily to the
narrower view that normative moral theory is analogous
to linguistic theory and that the way to the best theory is
to go back and forth between our intuitions and the theory
that accounts for them - putting wayward intuitions aside
or modifying the theory to account for them - until we
reach equilibrium. I am also unsure that equilibrium is
necessary for correct theories. Possibly some of our intu-
itions are so ingrained that even accepting a theory will
not remove them. It makes logical sense to say, as some
subjects in Baron (1992) essentially did, "I think that it is
wrong not to shoot one prisoner to save three others, but I
would not shoot." These subjects had accepted the conse-
quentialist'prescription for this case, but they would
violate it, possibly because of their strong intuition on the
other side.
Intuitions can have a role, however, as prima facie
arguments about theory and as signposts in the analysis of
cases (Baron 1933a, pp. 6-7). Intuitions surely have led
Hare, Mill, and others to look hard for consequentialist
arguments concerning evil desires and violations of
rights. Few would look so hard for a consequentialist
defense of ethnic cleansing. In analyzing fantastic cases
such as Foot's (Thomson 1990) organ donor, intuition
leads to a search for consequences beyond those de-
Response /Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
scribed, such as fear in the public at large. When the case
is modified so that these extra consequences are removed,
intuition may become less clear, or it may not. The case is
surely even more fantastic.
Finally, intuitions can play a large role in arguments
about prescriptive theory. Consequentialists differ among
themselves, for example, about the role of government
protection versus individual responsibility, the role of the
military in foreign policy, affirmative action, and so on.
One could say that these matters hinge on facts, but
decisions must be made before all the facts are in.
Perhaps I am still being too hard-nosed about intu-
itions. Surely there is more to be said here.
R1.6. The nature of consequences. Consequentialism can
be a slippery doctrine if anything counts as part of a
consequence. Here I discuss the standard issues in defin-
ing what is relevant to judgments of consequences and
how competing considerations are weighed against each
other. Later, I shall discuss the special features of my own
approach.
Arkes asks about the role of distribution. Utilitarianism
justifies equality of distribution according to the principle
of declining marginal utility (when other factors are con-
stant or unknown); this principle competes with others
derived from utilitarianism, such as incentive and differ-
ences in desire for the good being distributed. People
have developed heuristics for distribution, most of which
are compatible with utilitarianism in some cases (Baron
1993b; 1993c). People's willingness to sacrifice to ensure
equal division of a monetary reward in experiments is a
reasonable prescriptive application of one of these heuris-
tics, not clearly nonnormative given how little is spe-
cified. So, to answer Arkes's question, such people may be
following the consequentialist norm, prescriptively if not
normatively.
Arkes, Evans, Frisch, and Ritov ask about the rele-
vance of emotion. I (Baron 1985, pp. 62-63) and many
others have argued that emotional responses to decisions
are real consequences, not to be excluded from the
utilitarian calculus simply because they are not fungible.
But emotional responses to a decision always indicate the
availability of an option to try to control the emotions.
Sometimes the cost of control may be low enough to make
this option attractive.
Evans points out that conflicts can arise between the
goals of the decision maker and the goals of those affected
by the decision, especially in cases of action versus inac-
tion. This is why it is important to ask subjects what they
"should" do and to emphasize their fiduciary role in
hypothetical cases. Evans correctly points out that, in one
way, it is more difficult to show violations of consequen-
tialism for purely personal decisions than for decisions
that affect others. In the former case, we may have to rely
more heavily on demonstrations of inconsistency.
Frisch points out that even apparent inconsistency may
not be enough to show nonconsequentialism if the way a
problem is presented affects the emotional consequences
anticipated by the subject. I have argued (Baron 1993a,
pp. 59-60) that experiments testing expected-utility the-
ory should be fiduciary decisions that affect others who
experience the consequences without knowing what deci-
sions led to them.
Irwin points to the difficulty of determining the overall
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1 35
Response/Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
best consequence when goals conflict. Although goals
may appear to be "incommensurable," it is reasonable to
assume that this is a problem in (prescriptive) practice
rather than (normative) theory (Baron 1986; 1988b). But
this is a problem. The difficulty of trading off conflicting
goals is a source of potential disagreement among people.
Reconciliation is difficult so long as the difficulty of mak-
ing trade-offs goes unrecognized. In sum, I agree with
Irwin's comment.
R2. Peculiarities of my approach
Several commentaries deal with the particular form of
consequentialism that was sketched in the target article.
Many of my arguments do not hinge on the peculiarities of
this approach, but it is worth discussing.
R2.1. The argument for consequentialism. My basic argu-
ment is called "argle bargle" by Glymour, who lays bare
what he thinks is its logic. Pietroski thinks I might be
talking about a competence theory and does not under-
stand how an argument for consequentialism can avoid an
appeal to intuition. The target article does indeed provide
only a rough sketch. Here is a little more.
The argument begins by focusing on a certain type of
decision, that of endorsing moral principles or norms
(through gossip and shunning as well as more direct
means). Arguably, this is primarily what normative moral
theory is about (Baron 1993a, pp. 17-24). This sort of
claim is based on a decision to carve up the world in a
certain way by abstracting a set of situations and consider-
ing them as a separate class, namely, those involving
endorsement of norms.
The next step is to ask what reasons we have for
endorsing such norms. Clearly, our reasons must come
from goals we already have. But I argue (following Hare
1981, p. 40) that some of these goals must be ignored lest
the enterprise become contaminated by intuitions of
uncertain status, which make up many of our current
moral goals. This is probably the part that bothers Railton
(and Schick) the most.
This argument depends on a distinction among types of
goals (Baron 1993a, pp. 35-36): other-regarding goals,
self-regarding goals, and ideals. 3 Other-regarding goals
are contingent on the goals of others; altruism is the prime
example, insofar as it means desiring what others desire
because they desire it. Ideals concern standards for deci-
sion making by self and others, independently of people's
goals, and they include standards of physical beauty or
religious piety as well as more clearly moral standards.
Ideals are the kinds of goals we endorse when we endorse
norms. (This is what I mean by norms.) If we are trying to
decide what norms to endorse, we must therefore put
aside our ideals lest they influence our decision. We need
not do this, but if we do, we stand a better chance of
coming to some sort of agreement. Again, this is a defini-
tion of an enterprise. We could, if we wanted, allow our
existing ideals to influence our decisions about norm
endorsement, but this will not help to allay doubts about
the validity of those ideals.
The final step is an argument about why we might want
to ignore our particular position. As Morton points out,
for example, the rich have more reason than the poor to
36 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
distinguish harmful acts and omissions, because a norm
against harmful omissions will require them to sacrifice
for the benefit of the poor (Baron 1993a, pp. 24-25). I do
not feel I have fully answered this question, but I have not
found any other answers either. 4 (Why should I endorse
what an ideal observer would endorse? Or, what I would
endorse if I were behind a veil of ignorance?) One possi-
ble answer (Baron 1993a, pp. 29-31) is that agreement is
more difficult if endorsements are perceived as tailored to
self-interest. If people think I am endorsing a norm just
because it suits me and my ilk, they will do the same, and
we will not agree. There is no necessary reason they
should behave this way; it is a fact of human psychology.
In sum, I have not set aside - as Glymour and Schick
suggest I have - all reasons for endorsing norms, only
those that stem from ideals and from peculiarities of one's
position. Without these stipulations, movement toward
agreement would be much more difficult.
Schick also suggests that fairness and rights should be
considered as consequences in the Baron and Jurney
(1933) study. (I note that the subjects of interest were
asked to judge the consequences, so the definition of best
consequences was based on whatever they wanted to
include. Their voting decision was thus more influenced
by fairness considerations than was their overall judgment
of consequences.) Several others have also argued for
such a view, and Broome (1991) has shown that consider-
ations of fairness are consistent with a form of utilitari-
anism. I oppose this because it goes beyond the limita-
tions I have suggested. Fairness involves comparisons of
goal achievement across people, so it does not stem from
the goals themselves but, rather, from an ideal. Rights -
in most senses of the term - are something to be pro-
tected regardless of the goals of those affected, so for the
most part these, too, are ideals. Like other ideals, these
can arise from commitments to prescriptive rules, which,
in turn, may have consequentialist justifications.
Railton is right that I failed to bypass the issue of self-
other conflict. Although the vaccination examples are
largely free of this conflict (especially from the policy-
maker's perspective), I do claim that failing to help others
at a small cost is wrong. The question of the proper
balance of self-other interests is a difficult one that I
hoped to avoid here. My view (Baron 1993a, pp. 89-99) is
that whereas we should adopt equal treatment of self and
others as a normative ideal, we must apply this standard
to decisions about actual endorsement. This requires
taking into account the costs and benefits of moral exhor-
tation. The best we can hope for in practice is a kind of
"weighted utilitarianism" in which self-interest is typ-
ically weighed more than the interests of others, with the
weight depending on the relationship.
R2.2. The nature and creation of goals. I am not sure that
Katz is right in saying that I define well-being in terms of
unrestricted desire satisfaction, although it is true that my
view is closer to this than to hedonism, and I may also
have oversimplified this issue in the target article. In
Baron (1993a, Ch. 3), I defend a view that is closer to what
Scanlon (1993) calls informed desire-satisfaction.5 The
question of what sort of well-being counts in a consequen-
tialist moral theory is answered, I argue, by the norm-
endorsement approach: if we are to endorse norms that
tell others to look out for our well-being, what sort of

concerns about well-being give us reason to endorse such
norms? The relevant concerns are "informed" because we
would not want people to help us achieve goals that are
derived from deeper goals on the basis of incorrect beliefs
(Baron 1993a, pp. 37-38). It is the deeper goals that give
us our real reasons for endorsing norms. On the other
hand, we would endorse norms that tell others to look out
for our goals even if we did not experience the effects. The
question of whether we would endorse a norm concerning
some aspect of consequences (experienced, past, future,
etc.) thus provides a standard for assessing whether that
aspect is relevant to our well-being in the sense needed
(Baron 1993a, Ch. 3). Many of the critics of desire theories
(cited by Katz) lack such a standard.
One of the many questions that can be raised about
goals is found in Arkes's case of making a promise to a
dying friend. Arkes seems to think that the friend's goals
no longer count after death. Yet, arguably, we would
endorse a norm of keeping such promises because some of
our goals concern states that occur after death, and we
would want others to honor these goals, just as we want
them to honor other goals. So I argue (Baron 1993a,
pp. 42-45; opposing Parfit 1984) that past goals should be
honored in some cases. The norm of honoring deathbed
promises may be seen as a fully consequentialist one.
Katz raises an interesting case of helping an adolescent
commit suicide. It is true that this dilemma would be
solved if we did not put aside the norms we already have,
as I have said we should. But that is not the only solution.
We can act to save such adolescents out of concern for the
achievement of their future goals, those they will have if
they live (Baron 1993a, pp. 41-42; Hare 1981, p. 101). In
the typical case, we must also consider the goals of others,
such as parents, regarding the life of the person, and goals
stemming from our own attachment. And we can ignore
the adolescent's goals to the extent to which we think that
they are subgoals based on false beliefs, for example, a
belief that life is completely hopeless.
An important question raised by Katz, Spranca, and
Tetlock concerns when we should create or destroy goals.
Katz suggests we should give new goals to encourage the
adolescent to live. One possible answer (Baron 1993a,
pp. 45-50, also suggested by Spranca) is that we should
view decisions that create or destroy goals as no different
from other decisions, to be made with reference to the
achievement of goals in general. These goals can include
goals for the existence of other goals. This approach does
not tell us what goals everyone should have, but it does
tell us how to take the next step from wherever we are. (In
this regard this is analogous to the Bayesian theory of
belief formation.) By this account, whether, to give such
adolescents new goals has no necessary answer, but we
would probably want to see them have certain goals and
we would try to provide them. This is analogous to
creating goals in ourselves, and it is relevant to decisions
about bringing new beings into the world. This theory (or
any alternative to it) is therefore relevant to both morality
and rationality.
I am unsure about the value of Teigen's interesting
suggestion to distinguish functions, goals, and effects.
The idea of making decisions in terms of functions is
reminiscent of the doctrine of the double effect, with all
its problems (Kuhse 1987; Schick 1991). If a decision leads
to a bad but avoidable and foreseeable situation, it does no
Response/Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
good to say it was not intended or desired, or not the
function of the option chosen. Better to have chosen
another option.
R3. Psychological and prescriptive questions
The remaining issues concern the experimental demon-
strations of nonconsequentialist judgments and their im-
plications for policy. These issues are intertwined with the
normative questions.
R3.1. Experimental difficulties. The "et cetera heuristic" is
cited by Oatley, the possibility that subjects consider
factors not included in the experimenter's scenario, such
as the role of "herd immunity" in vaccination decisions.
Tetlock makes similar arguments, for example, about the
possibility of value expression in compensation judg-
ments. It is, of course, impossible to rule out such conse-
quentialist factors completely. However, in most of the
studies reported, subjects were asked for justifications of
their answers, and questions were modified if more than a
couple of subjects responded in this way. Moreover, in
reading subjects' justifications, we look not only for the
absence of extraneous arguments but also for the presence
of nonconsequentialist justifications, and we find these in
abundance (putting aside the question raised earlier about
the possible consequentialist benefits of applying appar-
ently nonconsequentialist rules - the point being that
subjects do not recognize these benefits, if they exist).
Finally, in most studies we have explicitly attempted to
eliminate alternative consequentialist interpretations; for
example, in our studies of compensation decisions, we
explicitly told subjects that liability insurance rates would
not increase, and, in some cases, that the amount of the
award would be secret (to limit the expressive effect). The
empirical papers cited provide more detailed (albeit not
necessarily complete) answers to this line of criticism.
Tetlock also asks about the role of blame avoidance and
anticipatory regret in apparently nonconsequentialist de-
cisions. These are consequences that should indeed be
considered, so it is possible in principle that these factors
provide a consequentialist account of our results or that
subjects simply overweigh them. In the policy-maker
role, however, it seems implausible that people weigh
their own feelings as much as the lives of untold numbers
of others. Moreover, subjects' justifications in most
studies indicate that they accept the norms that lead to
blame or regret. Subjects seem to see their emotional
responses to decisions as resulting from their own norma-
tive judgments (Baron 1992). They thus think of their
normative judgments as controlling both their decisions
and their emotions. When subjects are convinced to
change their normative judgments, both their decisions
and their anticipated emotions change in response.
The question of avoiding blame from others is slightly
more complex. Nonconsequentialist biases may be exag-
gerated because some subjects know that others have
these biases and will want them to decide accordingly,
even if these subjects do not share the bias in question.
For example, some of the opposition to active euthanasia
could result from people's feelings that other people
oppose it. Less likely is the possibility that all people are
wrong in their expectations about others. The experi-
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1 37
Response/Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
ments thus constitute prima facie evidence for the exis-
tence of the biases in question.
Tetlock also questions the Baron and Jurney (1993)
study of resistance to coerced reform, arguing that re-
sponses might "represent reasonable political goals that,
when carefully factored into the decision calculus, might
lead reasonable people to conclude that they would not be
better offon the whole if the reforms were implemented."
(Schick expresses the same concern.) It is interesting that
this is the only study reviewed in which subjects were
explicitly asked to judge the consequences of alternative
options, and the important cases were those in which the
subject would not bring a consequence about but judged
that consequence to be better on the whole. In other
studies, I have simply assumed that, for example, subjects
would judge fewer deaths as better than more deaths
(regardless of whether the cause was action or omission);
this assumption should (and will) be checked in future
studies.
Still, Tetlock's concern is on target, and further re-
search should address the problem of inducing subjects to
give careful judgments of "better on the whole." For
example, as Railton suggests, subjects might be asked to
provide deeper justifications of the principles on which
they base their opposition, and perhaps these will turn
out to be consequentialist. On the other hand, such
second-order justifications could be post hoc, constructed
on the spot.
Another problem raised by Ritov, who suggests that
judgments about consequences, even consequences for
others, might be affected by framing. We cannot infer this
from the Asian-disease problem she cites, because sub-
jects were asked about decisions, not judgments of conse-
quences. But, undoubtedly, inconsistencies in the judg-
ment of consequences will emerge, and the experimental
approach used by Baron and Jurney will lose some of its
appeal and simplicity.
In the Baron and Jurney (1993) study, however, the
status-quo effect supports our interpretation: subjects
would vote against repeal of borderline proposals already
passed but not vote to pass the same proposals; this
suggests that the unwillingness to vote for these proposals
was a result of participating in the decision rather than a
result of some unexpressed judgment that the conse-
quences were truly worse.
In the end, though, questionnaire studies provide only
one source of evidence for nonconsequentialist judg-
ments. Other sources are behavior of people in the real
world (e.g., the discrepancy between the number of
lawsuits against the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines, or
Arkes's examples of the sunk-cost effect) and explicit
statements of nonconsequentialist doctrine, for example,
by philosophers. Fuller is right to question the relation
between hypothetical questions and real behavior, but
any method has its problems, and different methods have
different problems, so all are useful together.
R3.2. The nature of errors. Subjects are making slips rather
than violations, Ayton & Harvey suggest, because they
are (sometimes) easily talked out of the violations. By this
account, any change of mind resulting from persuasion
would be ascribed to subjects' prior belief in what they
were apparently just convinced of. Further evidence that
responses were not slips in any normal sense of the term is
38 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1994) 17:1
provided by the use of within-subject designs in many
studies and from subjects' written justifications of their
judgments. Although some laboratory demonstrations of
biases are easily recognized and corrected by subjects,
many others are not (Frisch 1993). Ayton & Harvey say
that I 'blame" subjects for their biases. When we discover
that physics students still endorse naive theories of mo-
tion, however, we tend to blame their teachers, if anyone.
Perhaps we should take the same attitude here, except
that blame is not really the issue.
Evans makes an interesting distinction between im-
plicit and explicit rules. The fact that subjects can provide
justifications does not, indeed, show that they are follow-
ing explicit rules that they have recognized all along. They
could instead be basing their decisions on analogies to
examples, and they could be inventing the justifications
post hoc. But invention of principles also sets precedents
for justifications in later cases. And principles are some-
times explicit outside the laboratory. The transition from
ad hoc decisions to principles (and back) may be gradual
and complex (Hare, 1952, Ch. 4).
Jackson suggests that departures from consequential-
ism tend to be robust, whereas departures from logic,
decision theory, and probability theory tend to be more
fragile. Perhaps this could be tested by matchyig moral
and nonmoral cases (e.g., of omission bias). In my class-
room experience, the most robust bias of all is the ambi-
guity effect (Ellsberg 1961; Baron 1993a, pp. 63-66),
which concerns nonmoral decision theory. Many scholars,
including Ellsberg, do not recognize it as a bias, just as
many do not recognize nonconsequentialist decisions as
biases. Jackson is right that people who do not follow
decision theory are incomprehensible, but the sense of
"follow" here is much weaker than that required by
expected-utility theory. People can be generally sensible
but still make serious mistakes.
R3.3. The nature of overgeneralization. The term "over-
generalization" did not imply that people made errors of
inference (as Glymour thought it did). Nor did I intend to
say that overgeneralization is the only source of nonconse-
quentialist decisions. This idea is merely a first attempt at
partial explanation of the biases at issue. Many details
remain to be filled in. What I meant is that typically good
heuristics are applied blindly, regardless of their pur-
poses, as when an arithmetic student assumes that adding
a constant to each side of a fraction does not change its
value, overgeneralizing a principle that works well for two
sides of an equation.
I accept Levy's argument that this account may not
apply so much to development of moral principles within
individuals as to their historical development (although it
would be interesting to check both pathways through
research). My assumption here is not that all principles
begin as consequentialist ones (as Cohen understood me
to say), but, rather, that principles that have no conse-
quentialist value tend to be weeded out by cultural
evolution.
R3.4. Prescriptions. A few comments were devoted to the
prescriptive enterprise. One problem with prescriptions
is that we must decide what to do in the real world before
all the facts are in. Philosophers and psychologists usually
prefer to leave these matters to politicians and others who

live the life of action rather than reflection. As an aca-
demic, I must endorse Grush's call for understanding
cognitive architecture and Spranca's call for thorough
evaluation of any educational attempts, but I sympathize
with those who must act before these tasks are accom-
plished.
Tetlock correctly observes that my argument opens up
a rationale for statism. The work on coerced reform could
argue for government-imposed reforms even without
complete public support. But the "do no harm" heuristic
will also increase opposition to cutting government pro-
grams that should be dismantled. So governments would
also be justified in cutting popular but wasteful programs
(hoping, again, that the change will become the "status
quo" before the next U.S. presidential election). Tetlock is
also concerned about "transferring responsibility for
many personal decisions to the state." Decisions once
considered personal can become appropriate matters for
social regulation when their externalities become severe,
and vice versa. The issue is which decisions should be
regulated, not whether any should be. (For example,
property rights in Western cultures involve extensive
regulation that is not culturally universal.) The principal-
agent problem is indeed a reason for caution.
One role of the state (and also of private enterprises) is
to elicit people's values (goals) and try to satisfy them.
Irwin correctly points out that the trick is to evaluate
consequences independently of the decisions that lead to
them. Without such evaluations, welfare maximizers
would have to return to their clients at every turn to ask
about means as well as ends. Irwin is right that the
problems of value measurement have not been solved. As
Frisch points out, too, various measures of value disagree
with each other. This is an area ripe for research.
R4. Conclusion
I hope that this exchange has clarified the directions
future research must take. Here are some that I now see:
further efforts to rule out consequentialist accounts of all
the biases found; increased attention to eliciting judg-
ments of goodness of consequences, both in experiments
and in real life; extension of the general line of work to
possibly more insidious biases, held by fewer people,
such as those that lead to religious wars; educational
experimentation on methods of teaching basic conse-
quentialist ideas while respecting opposing ideas; exam-
ination of the effect of biases in real situations using
methods other than questionnaires about hypothetical
cases; development of a better theory of the origin of
moral intuitions aside from "overgeneralization"; studies
of the measurement of goals; historical and developmen-
tal studies ,of the origin of intuitions. Someone else can
study what's wrong with "omissionaries."
NOTES
1. Daniel seems to be making some additional points about
how the good consequences of following some rule do not
"constitute" its correctness. I am not sure what this means or
whether it contradicts the point I need, which is that conse-
quences justify correctness.
2. Phillips also suggests that sometimes no option is "accept-
able." Yes, but is it not still better to choose the one that is least
bad?
References/Baron: Nonconsequentialist decisions
3. Similar distinctions were made by Elster (1985, p. 240),
Gibbard (1988), and Hare (1963, Ch. 8).
4. A social-contract view is close to the one I propose (Baron
1993a, pp. 20-22), but no better in this regard.
5. The concept of "goal" is closer, however, to "value," in the
sense of a standard of evaluation or judgment, than to "desire" in
the sense of a tendency to choose. In the terms of Kahneman and
Snell (1992), desire is analogous to "decision utility" and value is
analogous to "experience utility" ("analogous" rather than identi-
cal because some values do not concern experiences). Values
(goals) give us reasons for preferences, and preferences (desires)
may be mistaken in their responsiveness to those reasons.
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