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I wanted to respond to Alex’s post—as a lot of the things she touched on are interesting to me. The idea of morality as defined by the intentions behind the act is somewhat how I look at it—but I would actually say that an action would be considered moral more in the case of doing something good just because they want to rather than due to an obligation. For example, is community service morally good if its done only because its mandatory? While an action itself may be good or bad in its own right, I think that to define the “morality” of the action we need to look at the intention behind it and that without proper intentions it is impossible to say that a person is morally right. Another example: If we kill someone out of self defense I think we would all say that this is morally okay, but if we kill someone because we wanted to I think we would all argue that the action is morally reprehensible.

Another thing that was interesting to me that wasn’t brought up all that much yet is the question: can there be rational thought separate from our emotional intuition? This question is incredibly hard to handle—because if the answer is no, then there is no way that we could ever figure it out because you can’t process without the lens of emotional intuition. Therefore, a more relevant question might be to wonder if there is a way to understand what our emotional intuition was telling us and then factor that in to our decision making process (which somewhat assumes we are capable of determining our emotional intuition in the first place, which is a bold claim to start out with). I think this is something that is really important that we start to do: I think as a society in general we need to question our preconceived notions of the world (as with all our neural diversity talks!) and try to parcel out what is societies influence on our decision making, what is due to our emotional intuition (and how is THAT shaped and molded by society), and then lastly how our genetic biological makeup contributes. To critically analyze all that is pretty much impossible, but I think it would definitely do the world some good if we could start to shape our emotional intuitions (and therefore our moral judgements) based on a critical analysis of the world, society, and our interaction with the two.