Medical intuition

Moral intuition, good deaths and ordinary medical practitioners.

Debate continues over the acts/omissions doctrine, and over the concepts of duty and charity. Such issues inform the debate over the moral permissibility of euthanasia. Recent papers have emphasised moral sensitivity, medical intuitions, and sub-standard palliative care as some of the factors which should persuade us to regard euthanasia as morally unacceptable. I argue that these lines of argu...

Measuring Intuition

The long-held popular notion of intuition has garnered much attention both academically and popularly. Although most people agree that there is such a phenomenon as intuition, involving emotionally charged, rapid, unconscious processes, little compelling evidence supports this notion. Here, we introduce a technique in which subliminal emotional information is presented to subjects while they ma...

Moral Intuition

Suppose we wish to understand a particular moral problem – for example, abortion. One way of proceeding is to reason on the basis of our existing substantive moral beliefs. We may, however, suspect that our moral beliefs about abortion, insofar as we have any prior to serious reflection, are unreliable. We may suspect, for example, that our beliefs about abortion reflect the influence of a reli...

Intuition and the Axiomatic Method Intuition and the Axiomatic Method

Intuition, reason, and metacognition.

Dual Process Theories (DPT) of reasoning posit that judgments are mediated by both fast, automatic processes and more deliberate, analytic ones. A critical, but unanswered question concerns the issue of monitoring and control: When do reasoners rely on the first, intuitive output and when do they engage more effortful thinking? We hypothesised that initial, intuitive answers are accompanied by ...