Moral responsibility and economic choice

Moral responsibility emerges in choice situations where the choice has wideranging consequences and not only the decision maker but also other parties are affected by the outcome of the choice. In this paper I will refer to such situations as complex choice situations. The purpose of this paper is to present a normative but realistic model of responsible choice. The model is normative in the sense that it prescribes the way a morally responsible decision maker should behave in complex choice situations. However, the model is intended to be realistic in the sense that it does not require anything from the decision maker that would be contrary to the psychology of human choice behaviour. The basic fault of the rational choice model is its lack of psychological realism. Rational decision makers should maximize their utility functions under perfect information. This is a highly unrealistic requirement for human beings. By more than 50 years of research Herbert A. Simon has demonstrated that real-world decision makers are not capable of maximizing their utility functions, partly because of their strongly bounded computing capacities, partly because of the strictly limited information they usually have. Real-world decision makers are only capable of making satisficing choices (Simon, 1979). Daniel Kahneman’s recent research shows that decision makers are unable to foresee the real experienced utility of their chosen decision alternatives. For this reason their choices are not rational for most cases (Kahneman, 1994).