Moral Judgments: A Case Study

At any given moment, we potentially face a vast amount of choices that require decisions based on what course of action we would consider to be right or wrong in the circumstances and often, these choices may differ significantly from person to person. What drives the decision-making process on moral judgements, that is judgements made on actions or characters that draw on values integral to our identity (Haidt, 2001), is the focus of this essay. The relationship between individual yet stable traits such as Need for Cognition (NFC) and Trait Anger (TA) and making utilitarian moral judgements will be focused on to explore the balance obtained between Rationalist and Social Intuitionist theories of moral psychology.
The crux of the debate …show more content…
Utilitarianism considers the optimal choice to be the one that has the greatest positive benefit for the majority, and has been associated with Trait Anger, a characteristic of interest in this study. Trait Anger is a stable disposition towards experiencing anger or irritation, distinguishable from State Anger, a person’s subjective feelings of annoyance or irritation resulting from situations (Forgays et al, 1997; Aslan, 2016). This study uses the Spielberger State Trait Anger Scale (STAXI) and draws on the Choe et al. (2011) study which found those with a higher TA score would make utilitarian judgments more often. They reasoned that higher TA scores resulted in these judgments due to being more quickly roused to act to prevent harm to others or more desirous of removing obstacles preventing them achieving a goal (Choe et al., 2011). However these studies lack clarity in explaining how and why TA has an impact on utilitarian judgements, but aids the direction of current research by indicating where personal decisions must be made, emotions or intuition have a greater impact on decision making but that the reverse may be true of impersonal decisions (Greene et al.,