"Emotions, Intuition, and Reasoning in Moral Decision Making"

Abstract

This paper explores the affective and cognitive dimensions of moral decision making. By reviewing and discussing traditional rationalist models and recent intuitionist models, we incorporate the perspectives of both moral reasoning and moral intuition to propose an interactive decision model to capture the composition and nature of moral judgments and decision making. We also introduce a hot-warm-cool-cold paradigm to explain the role of emotions and intuitions in moral decision making, especially how they signal people’s intuitive feelings about their own interests versus others’. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our synthesized model of moral decision making for organizational decisions.