Moral Intuition Is a Virtue, Sometimes

Abstract

As well as setting the scene for the section and contextualizing the four main contributions, this chapter also reviews how insights from fields such as the psychology of thinking and reasoning, social psychology, social cognitive neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology have implications both for how virtue is construed theoretically and its implications for the practice of leadership and management in business organizations. In this chapter it is argued that the principles of the social intuitionist model and moral foundations theory suggest strongly that moral behaviors are partially innate and hence universally available but also socially shaped and hence malleable. Therefore, individuals have the potential to intuit and habituate not only the virtues of the organizational cultures they live by but also their vices. On this basis moral intuition, as the proper automatic reaction to ethically relevant events, can be a mark of virtue, sometimes but not always.