Moral Realism and the Heuristics Debate

摘要

If one stayed at a fairly high level of abstraction, one might argue that everyone interested in heuristics at all thinks about heuristics in the same way: People are employing heuristics whenever they make a judgment or reach a decision without making use of some information that could be relevant or some computational abilities that at least some people possess. Again, looked at quite generally, theorists associated with both the H&B school as well as those associated with the F&F school agree that using strategies that are plainly not formal optimization strategies is, sometimes, absolutely “necessary” because we are incapable of employing formally optimal methods. What is most critical for lawyers and policy-makers to understand about the heuristics and biases school is that it is framed, fundamentally, as a critique of the realism, but not the desirability, of making decisions in accord with the dictates of classical rational choice theory. At core, rational choice theorists counsel that, as a prelude to a choice between two options, each of us should assess the probability of each ultimate outcome that might arise if a particular action-option is taken and the value of each such outcome and choose that action-option that maximizes the expected utility of the possible outcomes, weighting preferences about risk-seeking or risk-avoidance appropriately.8 Further, as a descriptive matter, they believe people typically actually make decisions this way, whether they consciously try to compute expected utility or merely act as-if that had been their goal. H&B theorists typically start with the assumption that people do and should seek to make conventionally rational decisions, and sometimes fail because they lack the internal resources (time, attention, and computational power) to do so. F&F theorists are far more prone to emphasize that making formally rational decisions does not inevitably serve the organism's goals; thus, we ought not to optimize in the fashion H&B theorists suggest we should even if we had limitless computational powers. In considering the problems that we are most likely to encounter in the claims that Mikhail and Sunstein each makes, it is most important to attend to the criticisms that proponents of each of these major “schools” of thought have identified in the work of proponents of alternative approaches. Once more, the basic conceptual idea here is that we solve problems using dedicated problem-solving algorithms, not by reducing all problems to a form in which they are tractable for a general computing machine. We can thus demonstrate that people are poor problem solvers if we give them problems they have little reason to decipher in real life (or at least real life in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation or EEA), even though solving the problem seems to involve no more formal math skill than solving problems that they crack readily when the problems must be answered to cope with a practical predicament.14Their explanation for this second deficiency in the H&B program is pretty similar to the explanation of the perceived failure of H&B theorists to test performance on “real world” problems. F&F theorists start with the evo-psych idea that mental capacities are adaptive. Given that preconception, they believe we are most likely to be able to identify mental capacities/mechanisms not simply by observation, but by reasoning backwards. We should first note the “need” (in inclusive fitness terms) that the organism had to meet and then intuit the capacity it must have developed to meet that need. While F&F theorists deride H&B theorists for failing to account adequately for the ways in which cognition is adaptive to the problems people actually face, the H&B theorists' most fundamental conceptual concern is that the F&F scholars' fixation on the ways in which capacities must be adaptive may often lead the F&F theorists badly astray. Mikhail has written only fragments detailing the views about morality that he sees as both commonplace and misleading in the legal academy, but the fragments seem fairly clear and revealing. In his view, those wedded to the wrong-headed orthodoxy reject the proposition that all reasonably healthy/functional people share reasonably concrete beliefs about when behavior is either morally permitted, obligatory, or prohibited without regard to either cultural background or idiosyncratic ideological disposition. The orthodox skepticism takes on several forms, and each, Mikhail believes, must be rejected. One must figure out what sorts of judgments (or behaviors) should be called “moral” in the sense that Mikhail is interested in. One possible theory of the “moral domain” is at core “substantive” and another at core “procedural;” it is uncertain whether either account delimits the domain in a helpful fashion. However one believes that Mikhail ultimately divides moral judgments from othe