[chii]

> People (even criminals) are not perfectly economic thinkers. That's probably a good thing.

why is that a good thing?

Perfect economic thinkers are good, because they'd be predictable and can be reasoned with. Providing economic incentives to such means you can direct behaviour in an easy and efficient way.

Irrational thinkers cannot be reasoned with via economic rationality. Therefore, either you have to stack the incentives so high that the cost becomes overbearing, or you use some other means of control that's less nice.

[contravariant]

Perfect economic thinkers will kill one guy so his organs can save three others.

Utility is a flawed way to capture ethics.

[chii]

Being perfect economic thinkers doesn't mean they are all powerful. How does one go kill one guy without consequence? The only person this perfect economic thinker has access to is himself, and surely, he values his own life at infinity.

Ethics is an agreement between people in society, which cannot be captured via economic rationalism alone, but economic rationalism can take into account current ethics, as well as other actors' propensity for more or less ethics.