Moral Argument Analysis

In this paper we look the morals and mores of people and try to determine if we born with a moral compass or if our morals — our sense of what is good or evil — is something which develops and accumulates over time. The author will look at the question whether human beings are innately benign, nefarious, or both at the same time.

The age-old question whether people are good, bad or both is something that has kept scholars and philosophers busy for centuries and it even keeps ethics students busy today. If we want to answer the question whether people have a natural born ability of being good or that this is an artistry which has been cultured by society over time, we have to start at the very beginning, with babies. Babies are humans in their

Intuition happens automatic, instant, subconscious and hardly takes any effort, so that actions that follow are without reason or thought. Contrastingly, reflection does require active thought and means weighing the pros and cons of every possible outcome. As thoughts rely on personality and other external factors, it can be stated this is biased and susceptible for contamination. Thus, we have to assume actions without thought come from our deepest inner self and can be considered as basic human nature (Ward, 2012). We can therefore conclude that whatever action follows from intuition — selfishness or collaboration — will be intuitive and most likely most aligned with basic human

The paradigms pose a conflict between individual and group rationality, respectively selfishness and collaboration, where a group whose members pursue selfishness may end up being worse than the group whose members pursue collaboration (Kuhn, 2014). In each of these studies intuitive decisions were associated with higher levels of collaboration, which shows that our first impulse is to collaborate with others. Follow-up studies showed the same behavior and confirmed the data once