I’m a cerebral sort of gal, who, in the past has felt I should subjugate feelings to reason. Which, sometimes, I should. A good time to exercise this might have been before eating a second bowl of frozen yoghurt last night.
Anyhoo, here we have a study showing that those who follow their gut reactions make more ethical decisions. I don’t know how science comes to these things, but I see this as a vindication for conscience. I.e. we all have one, so use it.
Although it’s widely believed that ethics engage reason, free from passion, a forthcoming study in the journal Administrative Science Quarterly finds gut instincts are more principled than logical thinking.
Back to my deep philosophizing though. We have feelings, logic and the gut/conscience competing for our attention. So on the matter of the frozen yoghurt, for example, my feelings told me to eat more. Logic would say a second bowl of frozen yoghurt for a girl who doesn’t tolerate milk well is a bad idea (and it is). But my conscience aka my gut, did not speak. So there are clearly some issues that fall outside of the moral domain.
This pertains to the whole ProWomanProLife thing because I think most women have a conscience on abortion, but they subjugate that to all those other reasons, very logical ones, on why abortion is suitable in their particular situation. I believe they pay for this in the long term, when the conscience they subjugated comes back to haunt them.
I believe we would increase our personal freedom, freedom that is not defined by government or people or any tangible source, if we followed our gut more often. We would then live in the freedom of knowing we had done the right thing. This is an idea that is hard to get at when we talk about abortion–the provision of which is generally viewed in mainstream culture as offering more freedom, not curtailing it. I, of course, have to be difficult and view things in precisely the opposite way, struggling to find a way to describe what it is I believe. And then eating too much frozen yoghurt when I am disappointed that I can’t do so adequately.
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