Diandra Maria Pânișoară
Moral Intuition and Its Limits
I n order to determine if the moral intuition of an individual has a valid reasoning to take consecrated decisions that can influence his life and those around him, it is essential to analyze the ethical valuation in terms of human existence. As far as older scientific studies are concerned, a now traditional way of explaining moral intuition has developed. This view holds that moral intuition does not go beyond the bounds of ethical decisions that are deliberate and rational, subjected to error and the situational factors involved (Treviño et al., 2006). However, new research determines that ethical behavior is influenced by intuitive and emotional factors (Graham et al., 2011; Haidt, 2001; Reynolds, 2006). To understand the contextual mechanism of moral intuition, we can define it as the emergence in what we call consciousness, the evaluative feeling regarding an external factor that undergoes an unconscious evaluation process. This new way of seeing moral intuition explains the whole process as automatic and guided by emotional boundaries. Given that this process is made with automatic neural functions guided by irrational reactions and subjunctivized by emotional factors, our trust in moral intuition may decrease characterizing the whole procedure as unstable. That is if we analyze the whole way of thinking as strictly reactive. We can consider that essential values are learned; when it comes to automated processes, the external environment and potential conditioning may play a relevant role. Thus, we can take the example of Michael A. Olson and Russell H. Fazio which includes an extensive study of the “reduction of active racial bias by implicit evaluative conditioning”. This study utilized an implicit
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