Top Highlights

• Varieties of nonconsequentialist decision-making Researchers have known for some time that peoples’ assessment of future values is subject to a wide range of curious and sometimes distorted influences. Decision-makers can discount consequences for a whole range of reasons:8 They can be interested in justifying a past choice more than maximizing fut...
• They can be driven by an imperative to act in a certain way, regardless of the consequences. They can feel themselves under the shadow of a moral obligation. A number of theories and concepts speak to the limits on consequentialist thinking, or the role of a single, dominant variable in determining behavior. One example is the “prominence effect,” ...
• makers care ‘too much’ for things that happen immediately, and seem incapable to attribute proper value to delayed events.”18 Immediate-payoff choices also seem more certain, and thus engage a distinct but closely related decision rule. As Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky put it, “people overweight outcomes that are considered certain, relative to ...
• situations, the act of following the norm becomes its own utility.21 Jonathan Baron and other researchers have examined a particular variant of such decision processes called “protected values.” These are absolute decision rules that resist any form of trade-off with other considerations. They are deontological in the sense that they dictate a cert...
• costs” of professional integrity. Someone asking such a question is likely to be told that they “just don’t get it”—the similar response, ironically, to those who challenge imperatives in a national security decision-making context.23 “Research on sacred values,” Tetlock concludes, “suggests a supplementary perspective that posits people to be intu...