Ethical Decision-Making : Intuitive or Reasoned ?
Dr Paul Strube | Endeavour College of Natural Health Adelaide
Abstract This paper turns attention to the roles that intuition and moral reasoning might play in ethical and moral decisionmaking . It first looks at a model of intuitive decision-making developed by Haidt , then contrasts it with one based on moral reasoning by Greene . It uses a case study as the backdrop for raising questions about the place these two ways of behaving have in Complementary Medicine .
Introduction
In an earlier article for this Journal , 1 I attempted to discuss the place of conscience in ethical and moral decision-making . It may seem that I have returned to the same argument here , due to the possible identification in some minds of conscience with intuition . Yet I hold these to be quite different ways of operating , a difference that has an important aspect in the context of this paper . In that earlier paper I took conscience to be our moral sense of right and wrong , and argued that we use this sense to reason about whether a certain issue is in fact right or wrong . Intuition I take as a faculty of knowing or understanding something without reasoning or proof . Put in other words , conscience can be taken as moral intuition , if and when it forms the background or set of premises for an act of reason about the truth of the intuition . In this sense , intuition per se has no moral sense built into it , while conscience does .
Are you an intuitive person ? Do you have strong intuitions about important matters in your life , and do you trust those intuitions ? More specifically , do you trust your intuitions when they involve moral or ethical decisions ? And more specifically again , would you trust those intuitions more than you would trust your moral or ethical reasoning about those decisions ?
Or are you a moral reasoner , more likely to look for rational reasons for making an ethical or moral decision , trusting such reasons more than you would your intuition ? Put more colloquially , do you decide from the head rather than from the heart ?
While it is quite likely that most of us use both ways of deciding , for the purposes of this paper I am going to treat them first as if they were separate , mutually exclusive ways of operating . This may be clearer if we consider the following example .
22 | vol28 | no1 | JATMS