Ethical Decision-Making Analysis

While the participants of this study may have higher NFC as university students, their likelihood of wanting to engage in effortful thinking does not reflect a high cognition in dilemmas. In addition, having the participants to rate their response does not engage cognitive thinking or moral emotions as much as being forced with a yes-no option in a situation. One would feel urgency to make an instantaneous decision, rather than to take time and weigh their affective or rational judgement. According to Haidt’s Social Intuition Model(2001), moral emotion fuels moral judgement, giving moral responses while reasoning is a post-hoc process to provide rational support to responses. Reasoning process may not be activated until after utilitarian response is made which is slower and requires effort; responses are then made by

Consider a driver on the interstate who is texting, which leads to an accident. The texter is at fault, but how do we determine how much so? Should the texter’s punishment be based on the outcome of the victim? Or should the punishment be based on the texter’s specific situation? When punishment is often passed down by a body of peers, understanding the effects of situation and actor characteristics on judgments of ethicality are crucial. Many factors affect how individuals interpret ethicality of action. This paper examines the relation between outcome and ethical judgment, specifically noting the effects of age on perceive

Our neurobiology (emotions) hold a great degree of power over the way that we make decisions in what we wish to pursue. Studies show the extent to which we use emotion in everyday decisions, whether in the ways we communicate with others to the ways in which w learn. Ethics and philosophical standings also have power over the knowledge we pursue for we must question the extent to which what we are researching is moral and its worth. Milgram's shock study and Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment are important ethical studies that show that it is important to look into our moral values before conducting research as without doing so will result in consequences that we will regret in the future. Our pursuit of knowledge is thus very heavily influenced by our emotions and ethical values. Though initially appearing to be simple, this question challenges us to examine areas of knowledge we previously would not have considered and thus allowing us to expand our knowledge of the factors that influence our journey for

For decades, moral psychology had been heavily influenced by theories emphasising on the role of reason and emotion in making moral judgements. Moral reasoning was thought to be defined as a slow, conscious and deliberative mental process that involved effortful and controllable manipulation of given information to arrive to a judgement (Haidt, 2001). On the other hand, moral emotions involved an intuitive emotional process that occurs impulsively and effortless without the person having conscious awareness of the mental processes that led to the concluded judgement (Haidt, 2001).

Moral emotions and intuition come first and directly cause moral judgment (Shweder & Haidt, 1993). Researchers use personal moral dilemmas in order to test the association between moral emotions and moral judgment. Personal moral dilemmas and judgments concern the appropriateness of personal moral violations (Greene et al., 2004). The footbridge dilemma is an example of a personal dilemma (Thomson, 1986). A trolley is racing down a track towards five workmen on the track who will be killed if nothing is done to the trolley. You and a large stranger are standing in between the trolley and the five workmen. The only way to save the five people is to push the stranger next to you onto the track to stop the oncoming trolley but he will die in the process. Most people would not push the stranger onto the track (Greene et al., 2001). Not pushing the stranger is a deontological response (do not kill innocents), whereas pushing the stranger is a utilitarian response (greatest good for greatest number). In Choe and Min’s study (2011), it was concluded that disgust propensity had a negative correlation to utilitarian judgment, while trait anger had correlated positively to utilitarian judgment. They had a variety of personal moral scenarios that were randomised and given to the participants, who were asked to choose an emotion that they felt. In order to have a better understanding

Current research suggest that emotions have global effects on all aspects of cognitions. One manner in which to examine this interaction is through Pennington’s (2002) framework of analysis. Pennigton (2002) argues that cognitive neuroscience needs to be conducted using levels of analysis. Pennigton breaks this into four categories: etiological (genes and the environment), brain mechanisms, neuropsychology, and behavior. Each of these structures effect each other and can be better thought of as integrated system. The role of emotions (in particular disgust) and its relation to moral judgment and reasoning can be analyzed within Pennigon’s framework.

Understanding ethical behavior from a process standpoint can enhance individual’s ability to recognize and respond accordingly to ethical dilemmas. A model developed by psychologist James Rest consists of four components of ethical behavior. The four components in this model are: moral sensitivity, moral judgement, moral motivation, and moral character (Johnson, 2016). This paper will provide a brief overview of each component and how it can affect an individual’s decision making method. Also discussed will be practices which can be employed to improve skills in each separate component.

No two people will have identical reasoning and intuition processes, which motivate their moral decisions or judgments. Thus, it is fundamental to study the influence of individual differences on the role of emotion, reason and intuition in moral decision-making. This in turn can tell us something about the cognitive processes and the way they differ from person to person. The present study is set out to consider how certain traits influence moral decision-making and how they interact with each other. The particular individual difference measurements focused on in this study include trait anger, disgust propensity, authority agreeableness and utilitarianism in moral judgments.

The current study considered the recent debate in moral psychology as to the primacy of emotion in individual moral foundations and judgments (Haidt, 2001) against previous conceptions of consciously driven reasoning processes as the major determinant in moral decisions (Turiel, 1983). The study, involving 596 undergraduate psychology students, was in part derived from the Dual Process Model (Greene, Nystrom, Engell, Darley, & Cohen, 2004) and questioned how distinct characteristics of personal and impersonal moral dilemmas appealed to emotion and reason respectively. It was suspected that the individual character trait Need For Cognition (NFC) would show positive correlation with utilitarian (i.e. harm minimising) responses for both personal and impersonal dilemmas. These hypotheses were not supported. The intuitive measure Disgust Propensity (DP) was expected to show negative correlation with utilitarian responses for the personal dilemma. It was also forecast that individuals with high levels of DP would demonstrate sensitivity to violations of the moral foundation of purity (Graham, Nosek, Haidt, Iyer, Koleva, & Ditto, 2011). These hypotheses were supported. The findings provide limited proof of the role of individual characteristics in moral activities. Further research accounting for factors such as age,

Moral psychology has a long-standing rationalist tradition focused on reasoning. More recent evidence emphasizes the role of emotions in models of moral development and behavior (Gilligan, 1993; Haidt, 2001). Yet, both reason and emotion likely play an important role in moral judgment. “Moral emotions” have been the focus of several recent empirical psychological studies. They differ from basic emotions in that they are intrinsically linked to the interests or welfare either of society as a whole or of persons other than the agent (Damasio, 1994; de Waal, 1996; Rozin et al., 1999; Haidt, 2002). Moreover, according to the dual-process theory (Kohlberg, 1969; Lierberman, 2002; Kahneman, 2003) a phenomenon can occur in two different ways, or as a result of two different processes. Often, the two processes consist of an implicit (automatic), unconscious process - which leads to intuitive emotional responses - and an explicit (controlled), conscious process - which leads to controlled cognitive responses.

Executive and other senior leaders make decisions based upon their values, morals, and ethics (Bass, 1990). The literature on the validity of making decisions based on judgement or intuition shows that there may be biases attached to these decisions. In order to determine the validity of these decisions, some researchers argue that these leaders need an educational foundation on the disciplines of integrity and ethics as discussed previously (DeGeorge, 1987; Fredrickson, 1971; Taylor, 1975). However, Vaughan (1979) argues that from a transpersonal psychology perspective, biases in decisions can be eradicated by developing intuitive skills and by paying attention to feelings of discomfort when a poor decision may be made or making a judgement called based only on your

The ethical decisions we make can effect how individuals are viewed in society. Emotions expressed in moral judgments inhibit or activate certain behaviors and actions when functioning in a social environment. Furthermore, Moral judgments allow individuals to follow general moral rules that support an affective state that binds behavior to social environments. Moral judgments rely on interactions between norms, values, context, and social environments that produce enforcement in social preferences and beliefs (Moll, Zahn, Oliveeria-Souza, Kruger, & Grafman, 2005). According to Rest et al. (1997) Moral Judgment is defined as, “ A psychological construct that characterizes the process by which people determine the morally right course of action from the morally wrong one in a situation.”

The role of emotions in moral judgement has been a subject of debate for many decades. As such, Hume, Smith, and Haidt suggested that emotions are the primary source of moral knowledge, while Kant and Nietzsche

The present research aimed to examine whether individual differences in emotion can predict the judgment made in moral reactions. To be specific, as the representative trait emotions, trait disgust and trait anger were investigated, and the study also analyzed their relationship with two moral domains, harm and authority. It was expected that trait disgust would be positively associated with the moral judgment of harm, and authority values, and trait anger would also positively associate with those two values.

The dual-process brain works through two distinct systems, an automatic, reflexive system that relies on instinct and emotion, and a slower, controlled system that enables us to direct our own thoughts. Moral decisions tend starkly toward reactionary and, without direct intent, may be distinctly emotional decisions. Utilitarian reasoning methods may enable the decision-maker to reduce biases, resulting in more sound decisions [7]. Learning to override the automatic system allows for increased involvement of utilitarian methods in decision-making [6] and just one instance of decision-making training has been shown to improve skills [8]. I propose that moral decision-making, a special case of decision-making, may be a