Inappropriate judgements: slips, mistakes or violations?

Abstract

Rational decision making is ideally governed by consequentialism, a normative standard where choices are evaluated by their efficacy in achieving specific goals. Systematic departures from this model occur when individuals follow heuristics that prioritize procedural rules over outcomes. These nonconsequentialist biases include the omission bias, where passive harm is preferred to active intervention, and the status-quo bias, where existing states are favored over superior alternatives. Such tendencies often stem from the overgeneralization of rules that are functional in limited scenarios but become cognitively detached from their original purposes. For example, legal compensation is frequently determined by the cause of injury rather than the utility of the award, and punishment is often applied retributively while ignoring deterrent effects. These cognitive biases suggest that human intuition is frequently structured by rigid heuristics rather than a fluid assessment of consequences. Identifying these patterns provides a basis for prescriptive interventions in public policy and education, aimed at aligning human judgment with normative consequentialist standards to improve collective welfare. – AI-generated abstract.