Moral heuristics

With respect to questions of fact, people use heuristics – mental short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that generally work well, but that also lead to systematic errors. People use moral heuristics too – moral short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that lead to mistaken and even absurd moral judgments. These judgments are highly relevant not only to morality, but to law and politics as well. Examples are given from a number of domains, including risk regulation, punishment, reproduction and sexuality, and the act/omission distinction. In all of these contexts, rapid, intuitive judgments make a great deal of sense, but sometimes produce moral mistakes that are replicated in law and policy. One implication is that moral assessments ought not to be made by appealing to intuitions about exotic cases and problems; those intuitions are particularly unlikely to be reliable. Another implication is that some deeply held moral judgments are unsound if they are products of moral heuristics. The idea of error-prone heuristics is especially controversial in the moral domain, where agreement on the correct answer may be hard to elicit; but in many contexts, heuristics are at work and they do real damage. Moral framing effects, including those in the context of obligations to future generations, are also discussed. Cass R. Sunstein is Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor, Law School and Department of Political Science, University of Chicago. His many books include Laws of Fear (2005), Why Societies Need Dissent (2003), and Risk and Reason (2002). Much of his research explores the intersection of psychology, economics, and law; he has been particularly interested in the role of cognitive errors and social influences on juries, legislators, judges, and those who are the objects of law’s commands. He is now working on a book on the production of social knowledge, with special reference to information aggregation across persons. that some of our deeply held moral beliefs might be products of heuristics that sometimes produce mistakes. If moral heuristics are in fact pervasive, then people with diverse foundational commitments should be able to agree, not that their own preferred theories are wrong, but that they are often applied in a way that reflects the use of heuristics. Utilitarians ought to be able to identify heuristics for the maximization of utility; deontologists should be able to point to heuristics for the proper discharge of moral responsibilities; and those uncommitted to any large-scale theory should be able to specify heuristics for their own more modest normative commitments. And if moral heuristics exist, blunders are highly likely not only in moral thinking, but in legal and political practice as well. Conventional legal and political arguments are often a product of heuristics masquerading as universal truths. Hence, I will identify a set of political and legal judgments that are best understood as a product of heuristics, and that are often taken, wrongly and damagingly, as a guide to political and legal practice, even when their rationale does not apply. 2. Ordinary heuristics and an insistent