But how do you know?

Understanding moral intuition

Hey, friends. I’m back. Later than I’d planned, but rebooting the operating system, so to speak, took longer than I expected. Thanks for being here. I’d still be writing no matter what, but I wouldn’t be doing it here if it weren’t for all of you. It’s a privilege to get to show up here and do what I do with and for you.

For those of you who are newer, you may not know that I tend toward two kinds of pieces here at the newsletter— deeply personal essays and essays where I nerd out about philosophy, spirituality, and psychology as they relate to the practice of integrity. Today’s newsletter is definitely a nerd-out, and there will likely be more of those than the other type for a bit. I’m working on a memoir, which requires me to scrape down to the absolute bottom of the barrel of myself. It’s a huge emotional lift, which I’m glad to do, but doesn’t leave as much of me available to be emotionally vulnerable here. Still, I hope you’ll stick around and feel you get some benefit. To be able to be of service, no matter what I write, is my primary goal here.

Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can't do that because it has had so little experience. A grown-up person knows the word because they've seen it often before.— Agatha Christie

A few weeks ago, we came together for a Thread. I kicked off the conversation by posing the question, “How do thinking and acting interact in your integrity practice?”

I didn’t realize it at the time, but what I was asking about was the relationship between intuition and integrity. (Thank you to Jocelyn Lovelle, who named intuition in the discussion, thus leading me down this rabbit hole.) But why does it matter, I wondered, the nature of this relationship? For two reasons, I found out.

The first is individual. Integrity, remember, is related to the idea of wholeness, which means our integrity practice is meant to be embodied, not just a head trip. We can try to tell ourselves that we’re consciously deciding how things should be and then choosing accordingly 100% of the time, but then we’re ignoring all the many ways in which we are motivated, as often as not, by gut feelings and emotional responses, aka “intuitive knowing.” If we can’t acknowledge the extent to which our decisions are primarily guided by our intuitions, then we are prone to one of the greatest near enemies of integrity— justification. Justification is when we do something and then work backward to show the just cause for why we did it, what some authors I’ll highlight today call “the rational tail getting wagged by the emotional dog.”

If we want to practice our integrity holistically, in other words, it behooves us to understand what intuition is, how it functions, and how to hone it so we can integrate our intuitive and deliberative processing capabilities intentionally.

The second reason the relationship between intuition and integrity matters is social. Some authors argue that “the hallmark of human morality is third-party concern.” In other words, Person A responds to something done to Person B by Person C. Research actually suggests this type of sociomoral response occurs in other primates as well. Regardless, the reality is that we make judgments about other people’s behavior all the time. We decide whether they are moral or immoral, good or bad.

For sure, there are things people do that are undeniably anti-social— cheating, stealing, lying, murder. But then there is the vast sea of grey area in which we simply don’t agree on how to prioritize or interpret behavior the same way that other people do. Understanding how intuition and integrity interact can help us consider our differences more even-handedly, and maybe even imagine how we might reach some wider agreement. Or, at the very least, learn how to live together better.

Photo by Matheus Viana on Unsplash

So, first let’s tackle what intuition actually is. Authors Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph, writing in the online journal for the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Daedelus, define intuition as “the judgments, solutions, and ideas that pop into consciousness without our being aware of the mental processes that led to them.” Our intuitions are often based on repetitive experience, like in the reading example in the Agatha Christie quote above. The higher our level of expertise, the more successful our intuitions will be in that area.

More often than not, our intuitive sense of a given situation is accompanied by what are called “somatic markers”: physical responses such as changes to heart rate, breathing, or sweat rising up out of our skin. We can also feel a response in our gut, and this isn’t some sort of woo-woo bullshit, either. Humans possess a neural network of approximately 100 million neurons lining the entirety of our digestive tract, according to the Harvard Business Review. Our gut is, in addition to its other essential functions, essentially our second brain.

We ignore our intuition at our peril. According to the BBC, patients with neurological disorders that disrupt their capacity to read the somatic markers that accompany intuition can either get stuck in endless thought loops, “analysis paralysis”, or they can ignore obvious risks when making choices. Those of us not suffering from full-on neurological disorders can also ignore our somatic markers, though. Why? Because we’ve been enculturated to ignore and distrust our bodies, while always privileging our rational minds. Whole books have been written about this, so I won’t go into all the reasons for it. Suffice it to say, the mind/body split found in much of Western religious tradition accompanied by misogyny ushered our embodied knowing out of the building.

Culturally, we’re also not supported in developing our distress tolerance, which is our capacity to sit with discomfort long enough to discern what is motivating it. Why would we be discouraged from developing this incredibly useful, pro-social tool? Because heightened distress tolerance is the enemy of capitalism and all systems of oppression, which depend on our ability to move fast and ignore any feelings of sympathy for those getting shafted.

Before we get too carried away with championing always listening to our intuition, however, it’s worth acknowledging that our intuition can easily get hijacked by unprocessed emotional material or unconscious bias. The remedy for the former challenge is the development of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the ability to discern your own and other people’s feelings, and then make choices that are constructively responsive to that information. The opposite of emotional intelligence is emotional reactivity, which can be read as intuition but is just emotional hijacking. If any stubbornness or defensiveness accompanies your or another person’s immediate emotional response to something or someone then that’s more likely emotional reactivity than an intuition worth heeding, in my experience.

Related to emotional reactivity in its lack of reflective functioning is unconscious bias. Unconscious bias is “a prejudice or stereotype an individual may hold about a particular group of people that they aren’t fully aware of.” The bias may be accompanied by reactive feelings of disgust or contempt. For those of us on the left side of the political spectrum, unconscious bias, particularly as it pertains to attitudes against marginalized groups, is a clear example of anti-social and potentially immoral behavior in others (and shame in ourselves). But if we dig into the social reasons to understand the mechanics of the relationship between intuition and integrity that characterization starts to get less clear-cut.

For me, integrity is one of the central spiritual disciplines of my life. While I practice, building up my strength and instinctual memory, it is often repetitive, sometimes uncomfortable, occasionally even painful. Reaching a degree of mastery when I can embody it in my life, though? When I no longer have to “think” about the commitment or process of being integrous? Then, my friends, reality and I can dance.

In their article for Daedelus on intuitive ethics, Haidt and Joseph focus on a subclass of intuitions they refer to as “moral intuitions”, or “feelings of approval or disapproval” which “pop into awareness as we see or hear about something someone did, or as we consider choices for ourselves.” They illuminate research that suggests these moral intuitions cluster around certain patterns of human social behavior that have proven to provide evolutionary benefits. Specifically, those behaviors related to suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity. As humans have selected over evolutionary time for pro-social traits related to these patterns of behavior, certain automatic, intuitive responses have been wired into us as a species. These intuitive “flashes”, they argue “are the building blocks that make it easy for children to develop certain virtues and virtue concepts”— sharing, kindness, fairness, loyalty, deference— across many diverse cultures.

Where it gets interesting, though, is when we consider the ways we apply those intuitive moral flashes as the world around us increases in complexity. Because the initial circumstance that caused the creation of that particular pro-social groove in our evolutionary make-up may have little to no surface resemblance to the current situation in which that intuitive wiring is being triggered. Nobody’s chasing down wooly mammoths around here if you get what I’m saying.

So, for instance, compassion, or the feeling of empathy and desire to relieve the suffering of others, was originally likely inspired by the need in mothers to respond to their own children’s distress. Over time, as our sense of the world and the scope of humanity— of who constitutes our kin— expanded, more and more living things were subject to that compassion intuition. Now, I can look at my phone and see a video of a dying polar bear or a sick child on the other side of the planet and feel that same moral intuition towards compassion that early humans felt for their children rise up in me in response.

This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. However, it can work against us, overloading our finite, individual wiring. Human evolutionary capacity didn’t develop in tandem with our level of exposure to a world of stimulus, so we are potentially easily overwhelmed with compassion fatigue unless our deliberative reasoning steps in to create some boundaries to manage it all.

Another example of what Haidt and Joseph call the “proper domain”, or original trigger, of a moral intuition and the “actual domain”, or current circumstance that triggers that intuitive wiring, is in the realm of purity. Originally, intuitions around purity arose in humans who moved through a world rife with “dangerous microbes and parasites.” “The proper domain” of the purity intuition, they write “is the set of things that were associated with these dangers in our evolutionary history, things like rotting corpses, excrement, and scavenger animals.” The emotional response to encountering these factors in the environment is disgust and aversion. Various cultures then developed complex moral systems to dictate rules around diet, hygiene, bodies, and sex, formalizing these intuitions into virtues.

Despite the fact that our current reality doesn’t require those taboos anymore, groups of people get associated with them. So, biases are taught based on instinctual disgust, for instance, motivated by stories that certain racial groups or genders are “unclean” or people of a certain sexual orientation engage in acts that are “impure.” Our rational minds may know there is little truth to such assertions, but that doesn’t remove the intuitive hardwiring, which is susceptible to being triggered. Once the triggering happens, stories that justify us start to become compelling.

I’d always wondered, honestly, how children could be taught racism, for example, since it seems so anti-instinctual to me. But as Haidt and Joseph wrote [in 2004, when the political landscape was slightly less toxic], “American political conservatives value virtues of kindness, respect for authority, fairness, and spiritual purity. American liberals, however, rely more heavily on virtues rooted in the suffering module (liberals have a much keener ability to detect victimization) and the reciprocity module (virtues of equality, rights, and fairness). For liberals, the conservative virtues of hierarchy and order seem too closely related to oppression, and the conservative virtues of purity seem to have too often been used to exclude or morally taint whole groups (e.g., blacks, homosexuals, sexually active women).” What they’re arguing, in other words, is that much of what we characterize as immoral in others today would be more aptly understood as a different interpretation, application, and prioritization of evolutionarily hard-wired moral intuitions.

This isn’t to say that I’m not going to push back on justifications of individual bias or oppressive systems based on what I believe is the misinterpretation of moral intuitions. But appreciating how a moral intuition can be applied in differing ways, thus yielding seemingly opposing acts of integrity is useful. It helps me remember we share more wiring than not, despite the repetitive, lived experience that may have honed our intuitions differently. Better to approach opposing viewpoints and conflict with some humility, as well as some understanding of how behavior and decision-making work, rather than proclaiming other people immoral.

When was the last time your moral intuition was triggered? What did you do then?

Moral intuitions are, they write, a “subclass of intuitions, in which feelings of approval or disapproval pop into awareness as we see or hear about something someone did, or as we consider choices for ourselves.”