As I said, this piece of philosophy involves some very large empirical claims that are usually made in an extremely sketchy way and without real evidence (not that there isn’t much supporting evidence out there). One would have expected that, instead of feeling comfortable in the consensus that Hooker describes, consequentialists would take the question of whether these biases might be overcome more seriously.

“When confronted with that criterion of moral wrongness, many people naturally assume that the way to decide what to do is to apply the criterion, i.e.,

Act-consequentialist moral decision procedure: On each occasion, an agent should decide what to do by calculating which act would produce the most good.

However, no serious philosopher nowadays defends this decision procedure (Mill 1861, ch 2; Sidgwick 1907, pp. 405-6, 413, 489-90; Moore 1903, 162-4; Smart 1956, p. 346; 1973, pp. 43, 71; Bales 1971, pp. 257-65; Hare 1981; Parfit 1984, pp. 24-9, 31-43; Railton 1984, pp. 140-6, 152-3; Brink 1989, pp. 216-7, 256-62, 274-6; Pettit and Brennan 1986; Pettit 1991; 1994; 1997, 99-102, 156-61). There are a number of compelling consequentialist reasons why the act-consequentialist decision procedure would be counter-productive.

First, very often the agent does not have detailed information about what the consequences would be of various acts.

Second, obtaining such information would often involve greater costs than are at stake in the decision to be made.

Third, even if the agent had the information needed to make calculations, the agent might make mistakes in the calculations. (This is especially likely when the agent’s natural biases intrude, or when the calculations are complex, or when they have to be made in a hurry.)

Fourth, there are what we might call expectation effects. Imagine a society in which people know that others are naturally biased towards themselves and towards their loved ones but are trying to make their every moral decision by calculating overall good. In such a society, each person might well fear that others will go around breaking promises, stealing, lying, and even assaulting whenever they convinced themselves that such acts would produce the greatest overall good. In such a society, people would not feel they could trust one another.”

(Brad Hooker, Rule-Consequentialism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism-rule/

Similarly, regarding: “There are many cases where we would better reduce bias overall if we adopt policies that don’t aim to directly minimise bias in each particular case.”

I would say something like: “There are policies for reducing bias that are consequentially superior to the policy of (a) enumerating each individual cognitive bias and asking (b) fallible human beings with (c) strong emotional stakes in the debate to point out what (d) seems to be a match between some argument and a known bias with (e) a strong social convention that (f) any such apparent match is deontologically forbidden and (g) constitutes a crushing blow in the debate.”

On the other hand, I’m not sure there’s any case where, as a matter of minimizing your own, individual biases – trying to cast out the log in your own eye – it doesn’t make sense to try to minimze, in each case, anything that you judge to be a bias; provided that you do exercise some discretion in judgment of yourself and do some (but not too much) reasoning about what is or isn’t a bias. In a heated public debate, I worry that arguments about what is or isn’t a bias will cripple any benefit that might be derived. In the silence of our own minds we might do better, given a humanly realistic amount of self-honesty.

Systems of ideas that allow people to easily generate charges of bias against anyone who disagrees with them have always been popular — both marxism and psychoanalysis owe some of their enduring appeal to such a feature.