Introduction

In my senior year of high school, I encountered a situation that would shape my understanding of moral decision making. During an exam, my teacher was forced to leave the room because of a family emergency, and the class was left unsupervised for a brief period. Our school was short on staff and emergency subs who were normally on call during the day, so our principal was trusting us to be responsible. His trust was quickly tested when several students proposed sharing answers on the exam.

One student had the idea to use our time alone to share answers for our exam; he wanted someone to submit the test first and then give everyone else the answers afterward. Lucky for him, a girl volunteered to submit first because she felt confident in her answers. As the situation unfolded, I felt an immediate sense that participating in the cheating was morally wrong. Something deep inside me knew that what we were doing was wrong; not only for ourselves, but also for our teacher. Going through with the cheating was abusing the family emergency our teacher, who was usually very lenient and forgiving, had at that moment. All that was going through my head was that, if she found out what had happened, it would crush her trust in us and make her feel like a failure. My intuitive response ultimately motivated me to report the incident to the principal. As everyone was getting their answers from the girl, I managed to sneak out of the classroom and walk to the principal’s office.

Although reporting the incident carried social consequences, the experience demonstrated to me that an intuitive moral judgment could shape ethical action before deliberate reasoning was fully articulated. I decided to tell our principal because I knew what they were doing was morally wrong; as a result, going with my gut feeling – my intuition – had an effect on the moral decision I made at that moment. This experience raises a broader question about the relationship between intuition and ethical judgment: is moral decision making driven primarily by rational deliberation, or do intuitive emotional responses guide ethical action before conscious reasoning occurs? To answer this question, I will examine how intuition shapes moral decision making in three key ways: by guiding immediate ethical judgments, by working in tension with rational deliberation, and by operating through social and emotional influences explained by the Social Intuitionist Model.

Key Definitions

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, intuition “…in philosophy, is the power of obtaining knowledge that cannot be acquired either by inference or observation, by reason or experience.” There are many factors that can impact intuition, including past experiences, emotions, and the complexity of the problems at hand. Intuition also differs from person to person depending on their thought process and the way their brain works. Everyone has a different way of processing information and emotions, and the way an individual’s brain interprets these things determines how strongly they feel intuition. The feeling of intuition can vary in intensity, ranging from subtle awareness to strong physiological responses.

Ethical or moral reasoning can be defined as the cognitive process of determining what is right or wrong. Similarly, moral or ethical reasoning is also affected by an individual’s emotional processing capacity. Emotions are strongly linked with moral reasoning, and “the proposed integrated model of ethical decision making fits well with such a perspective, proposing that the intuitive ability of the decision maker to perceive, reconstruct, and evaluate moral issues related to the ethical dilemma, largely depends on his/her emotional processing capacity that represents the affective component of intuition,” (Dane and Pratt 200, qtd. in Zollo et al 697). Due to the similarity between moral decision making and intuition of emotional processing of individual people, many scholars of philosophy and psychology believe the two to be connected; however, is this actually the case?

Rationality and Intuition Combined

Scholar Albert Musschenga looked at the connection between intuition and moral reasoning and decided that humans are incapable of making moral judgments solely based on rational thinking. A problem that instills this belief is that, when humans go on rational reasoning alone, we tend to leave out many important factors, even with a cost-benefit perspective of ethical decision making in mind (Musschenga). This cost-benefit analysis is a way of determining whether or not doing something is worthwhile, and you do this by comparing the benefits you gain from your decision and the costs you’ll incur (Marks).

Musschenga’s ideas remind me of a story my mother once told me about her making a difficult decision based on her own intuition and rationality. The case study begins with my mother being asked to babysit a one-year-old by a former friend; however, this was expected to happen during her workday, since she works from home. My mom told me that she thought a lot about the decision before agreeing to it, but it still didn’t feel like she was doing the right thing by choosing to help (Rimel). On one hand, her thought process was very rational; my mom went through the pros and cons of helping. The only exception is that she chose to ignore her gut feeling; or rather, her intuition. When she let her friend know that she would be willing to babysit during her workday, they made arrangements for times, payment, and how the babysitting would work to fit both of their schedules. Although my mom thought helping was the right thing to do, the agreed-upon arrangement had started to go downhill.

After a few weeks of babysitting, my mom’s “friend” was constantly late picking up her child, and would even drop off her older daughter for a few hours sometimes. Not only was that an issue, but the matter of payment also started to become a problem. My mom’s friend had agreed upon paying for the service at the end of every week, but after three weeks of babysitting, my mom was yet to be paid. All of this was still going on during my mom’s work day: having to watch both a one-year-old and a seven-year-old, waiting for their mother to pick them up even after the promised time, and not getting paid for any of it. My mother continued to babysit for one more week after that until she finally couldn’t handle the two kids and working. She decided to talk to her “friend” about everything, and she made it seem as if their conversation was an inconvenience to her (Rimel). This is when my mom put a stop to everything — the babysitting and the friendship. My mom realized that she was being taken advantage of because she decided to help someone who really needed it, but she neglected to take her intuition into consideration when making that decision.

This is one of the main points that Musschenga is trying to get across. By my mom making a decision solely based on rational thinking, it changed the course and effects of the decision. What if my mom had decided not to babysit because she felt that it was a bad idea? Perhaps they would still be friends, and she wouldn’t have had to endure such a stressful situation during her workday. However, Musschenga also believes that individuals could improve their intuition throughout the years. If someone manages to improve their own intuition, it could also improve their ethical and moral decision making skills. Musschenga states that “while individuals keep being confronted with new situations and new problems, moral development never really ends and needs to continue in adult life. This is recognised by Hogarth. He states that, although the moral character of people already has a clear shape in adolescence, intuitive moral thinking can still be improved in the years thereafter” (Musschenga).

After talking to my mother about Musschenga’s ideas, she seemed very intrigued about improving her intuition and working on trusting her own gut more, rather than just going based on rationality (Rimel). This led to a discussion of what she would do differently if the opportunity was given to her again. Something that stood out to her when first making the decision to babysit was that when she was initially asked, she immediately felt a “bad feeling” about the whole ordeal (Rimel). My mom thought about that feeling a lot after our discussion, and she told me that she would have changed the way she thought about the decision of babysitting by addressing that bad feeling more. She believes that if she were to voice that feeling out loud and actually listen to her own intuition, she would not have decided to go through with watching her friend’s child (Rimel). This example illustrates how ignoring intuitive warning signals may distort ethical judgment, even when rational reasoning appears sound.

The Social Intuitionist Model

An interesting take on the relationship between intuition and moral reasoning is the Social Intuitionist Model (SIM). The model was created by the American psychologist Jonathan Haidt in 2001 after the realization that intuition is a fast and automatic process within the brain, and it largely stemmed from Antonio Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis (SMH). The SMH “postulates that reasoned decision making is influenced by biasing signals (somatic markers) arising from changes in the body periphery. First triggered as a reaction to experienced feedback (e.g., increased heart rate or visceral responses), the somatic reactions are assumed to be reactivated in similar decision situations” (Müller et al). In layman’s terms, the social intuitionist model shows that intuitions and emotions directly cause moral judgments and ethical reasoning.

From the SIM, there are four claims for morality and moral positions: intuition will always come first, moral positions are often influenced and can be changed by outside factors, positions are primarily taken to influence others, and they are rationally justified after the decision has happened. Key components of the model include the intuitive judgment and the post hoc reasoning links. Firstly, the intuitive judgment link represents the fact that moral judgments will come into the consciousness instinctively and automatically due to moral intuitions. Secondly, the post hoc reasoning link refers to the fact that a person must put a lot of effort into moral reasoning while they look for different arguments that support their judgment and decisions.

We can analyze the following story from a dear friend of mine through the lens of the Social Intuitionist Model. His story begins at the age of five when he was in kindergarten. My close friend’s kindergarten teacher had this tiny Lego man with a funny looking hat that he’d always admired. One day, after an extremely tiring and long week, my friend had made the decision to take the Lego man. There was no reason clear to him why he wanted to take it, except for the mere fact that he wanted it (Priestley). Because of this, he stole the Lego man and put it in his pocket. This is where the SIM begins in the case study.

Immediately after stealing the Lego man, my close friend felt an overwhelming sense of guilt. This was an immediate negative feeling due to an action he had just committed, which represents the intuitive judgement link. He felt this dwelling guilt all the way on his bus ride home; however, due to his age, he couldn’t really explain why at that given moment (Priestley). Once he got home, he got off the bus and talked to his parents about the situation. They wanted to help him work through his emotions, so they asked him why he felt guilty for taking the Lego man. The only reason my friend could manage was that it was wrong to take things that don’t belong to you. The fact that he was able to work through the guilt and come to the reasoning of why he felt that way represents the post hoc rationalization link within the model.
Finally, after talking to his parents and realizing that what he did was wrong, he decided to give the Lego man back to his teacher. In doing so, they talked about the situation and he apologized, and everything all worked out in the end (Priestley). Both my close friend’s parents and teacher had a social influence on his decision to give the Lego man back. This is what the whole model is trying to explain. My friend had an immediate intuitive reaction based on emotions, which led to a rationalized way of thinking, and those factors led to his moral decision making. This example demonstrates how my close friend’s experience reflects the Social Intuitionist Model, in which intuitive emotional responses emerge first and are later shaped through rational reflection and social influence. Although this is a very small scale example, it suggests that the model is accurate and that humans do things and think this way all the time; however, what would have happened if my friend hadn’t felt any kind of emotion at all?

Conclusion

“Alexithymia is when a person has difficulty experiencing, identifying, and expressing emotions” (Leonard). With the involvement of alexithymia, or emotional blindness, it can be hard to determine whether or not intuition truly has a role in decision making. For individuals who experience alexithymia, it can be seen that emotional and interoceptive signals have less impact on decision-making processes. According to one study conducted in 2016 by Shah et al., results fortify the idea that emotional blindness weakens the correlation between intuition and ethical decision making.

Furthermore, alexithymia strengthens the concept that intuition affects the decisions humans make. This is due to the fact that only approximately ten percent of people in the United States, as well as the general population, have emotional blindness. With that being said, where does that leave the rest of the people in the world? It leaves them relying on some combination of both emotional and analytical ways of thinking to solidify the next decision they have to make. With the use of both intuition and rationality, humans have developed ways to make dcisions that have the ability to alter the course of their lives.

The evidence explored in this paper suggests that moral decision making cannot be explained through rational deliberation alone. Rather, ethical judgment emerges through the interaction of intuition, emotion, rational reflection, and social influence. Thinking about the ways people tend to make decisions and what factors can entail how those decisions are made can put a lot of pressure on one person; however, it can be seen as a positive pressure that’s not all bad. Whether the decisions we make are something that we dwell on before finalizing them or they’re quick and straight to the point, it’s still a decision that we use rationalization and intuition to make.
This research, and further research, gives people the opportunity to understand some of the ways their decisions are made; this is beneficial because a lot of the choices we make have the ability to affect our lives in irreversible ways. Research like this is important for shining light on the fact that decisions are important. I at least hope that my paper will help some people understand how they make decisions and not take what they’re about to do for granted. Understanding how intuition, emotion, and rational deliberation interact is essential not only for ethical theory, but for understanding how ordinary people make consequential moral choices in everyday life.

Works Cited

Britannica Editors. “intuition.” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/intuition.

Haidt, Jonathan. “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment.” Psychological Review, vol. 108, no. 4, 2001, pp. 814–34, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.108.4.814.

Marks, Libby. “What Is a Cost Benefit Analysis? (Explained in Plain English)” Real-Time Resource Planning Software | Runn, https://www.runn.io/blog/cost-benefit-analysis#what-is-a-cost-benefit-analysis.

Müller, Silke, et al. “Decision Making – A Neuropsychological Perspective.” Encyclopedia of Behavioral Neuroscience, 2nd Edition, Elsevier, 2022, pp. 396–403, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-819641-0.00132-8.

Musschenga, Albert. “Moral Intuitions, Moral Expertise and Moral Reasoning.” Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol. 43, no. 4, 2009, pp. 597–613, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.2009.00707.x.

Priestley, Christian. Personal interview. 23 November 2024.

Rimel, Janine. Personal interview. 23 November 2024.

Shah, Punit, et al. “Emotional decision-making in autism spectrum disorder: the roles of interoception and alexithymia.” Molecular Autism, vol. 7, no. 43, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1186/s13229-016-0104-x.

Leonard, Jayne. “Alexithymia: Symptoms, Diagnosis, and Links with Mental Health.” Medical News Today, 25 Sept. 2019, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326451.

Zollo, Lamberto, et al. “What Sparks Ethical Decision Making? The Interplay Between Moral Intuition and Moral Reasoning: Lessons from the Scholastic Doctrine.” Journal of Business Ethics, vol. 145, no. 4, 2017, pp. 681–700, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-016-3221-8.