Three reservations about consequentialism

Abstract

Consequentialism provides a normative standard for decision making by asserting that the best choices are those that yield the best expected consequences for achieving an agent’s goals. Nevertheless, human judgment frequently deviates from this standard through the application of nonconsequentialist heuristics. These biases manifest in various forms, including the preference for harmful omissions over less harmful actions, the irrational privileging of the status quo, and the provision of third-party compensation based on the cause of an injury rather than the utility of the redress. Furthermore, decision makers often ignore deterrent effects in favor of retributive punishment and resist coercive social reforms even when those reforms are judged to be collectively beneficial. These nonconsequentialist principles likely result from the overgeneralization of rules that are functionally consistent with consequentialism in limited, everyday contexts. Over time, commitment to these rules becomes detached from their original instrumental purposes, leading to suboptimal outcomes in more complex or specialized scenarios. Recognizing these systematic biases is essential for refining experimental methodology and has significant implications for the intersection of psychology and public policy, as well as the development of educational interventions designed to improve human choice. – AI-generated abstract.