Moral intelligence is the capacity to reason emotionally, to think about our beliefs, values, and preferences in an objective, but non-detached manner. Moral intelligence allows us to connect to the values in our facts and to recognize the factual wisdom in our values. This is not the same as alternating between examining facts and the processing values, but to have the capacity to both think and feel at the same time. Moral intelligence is there to help us deal with facts that matter and understand our passionate beliefs.
Moral intelligence is the ability to remain aware of our values, morals, and biases while acting in the world. We need moral intelligence when making choices about things that are meaningful, important and potentially life changing. A higher level of moral intelligence helps you make choices that are important and meaningful in a healthy, constructive, and growth-producing manner. A lack of moral intelligence results in impulsivity or may result in avoiding important and meaningful situations that need resolution. We need to utilize our moral intelligence in order to make the best choices we can in difficult situations.
Topics below:
The Nature of Intelligences
Integrating Thinking and Feeling
Developing Moral Intelligence
Awareness of our beliefs, values, and preferences allows us to make flexible and adaptive choices when we are facing important challenges in life. Our values and preferences bias our choices; remaining aware of this helps us to proactively direct our choices. If we are blind to our values, these values will nonetheless continue to direct our choices, often outside of our free will. As we develop our moral intelligence, we can clarify how our values limit our perspective. Understanding our biases and preferences widens our decision-making horizon, as well as increasing our tolerance for complexity and frustration. Moral intelligence helps increase our freedom of choice.
The Nature of Intelligences
The idea of moral intelligence might sound today as farfetched as the term emotional intelligence would have sounded in the time of Freud or Darwin, two men for whom emotions were simply troublesome remnants of an instinctual animal past. Just as Freud and Darwin viewed emotions as primitive mental functions rooted in crude instincts, many people today view moral thinking as a crude and primitive way of thinking. Similarly, modernity has cast moral thinking into the abyss of religious zealotry or medieval scholasticism. However, our ability to make choices based on values is not a primitive superstition. It is a mental capacity that can be developed and enhanced.
Being human means having the free will to make meaningful choices in life. Freedom to choose requires us to have some mastery over our thoughts, feelings, and desires. Moral intelligence provides this freedom through the integration of emotion, intuition, and rational thought. Moral thinking is the manipulation and utilization of thoughts that are inextricably associated with sentiments; a place where cognition colored by sentiments is motivating. We often experience this linkage of thought with feelings as a subjective sense of rightness or wrongness. This combination of rationality and emotion generates states of mind that we feel as moral convictions, strong beliefs of good and bad or right and wrong. Furthermore, these moral convictions, being both reason and passion combined, are frequently accompanied by a felt call to action.
Moral intelligence is an inherent part of our human nature. It has adaptive value from an evolutionary perspective because it is a stabilizing influence on behavioral choices. This stability counteracts need-driven impulsivity—moral intelligence is a counterbalance to need-driven activity. Moral intelligence allows for an adaptive balance between negotiating competing needs and desires, thereby facilitating the making of sound choices. The quality and content of moral intelligence emerges from the same environmental determinants as many human talents and abilities, including life experiences interacting with temperament. Moral intelligence is not innate moral knowledge, it is the innate capacity to develop values that, based on life experience, guide us toward making adaptive choices, helping us flourish in our environment.
Renowned Harvard psychologist, Howard Gardner, has extended the concept of intelligence beyond the bounds of the general intelligence reflected in IQ tests. Gardner has identified numerous types of intelligence including mathematical, linguistic, kinesthetic, spatial, musical, and interpersonal intelligence. Gardner believes there may be a whole range of yet unidentified intelligences and has called for psychologists to apply his criterion to other human abilities. To qualify as an intelligence, an attribute must be related to a skill that resolves problems and leads to the acquisition of knowledge. Gardner lists several specific criteria, the most salient being: an intelligence should have neuro-psychological support; there must be individuals who have exceptional ability in the area, as well as individuals who are very lacking; there must be a set of fundamental operations; and an evolutionary plausibility. Research in moral psychology shows us that moral intelligence more than qualifies as intelligence under Gardner’s criterion.
Integrating Thinking and Feeling
When we are using our moral intelligence, we are integrating our thinking and feeling into one coherent function. Moral thought combines reason and feeling, neither emotional nor rational, but an integration, or more precisely, a fusion of these aspects of mind. Moral thinking is neither pure rational cognition nor pure emotion-based action, but rather an amalgamation of reason and emotion. To fully appreciate the nature of moral intelligence requires conceptualization of moral thinking as lying outside the dichotomization of either reasoning or feeling. The distinction between rational thought and emotional process does not apply to moral thinking.
Reason and passion define a dichotomization that has challenged moral thinkers throughout the ages. The rationality of the reasoning mind has been set off against the irrationality of the passions. The activating force of the passions is juxtaposed to the inhibiting nature of reason. In the field of ethics and moral theory, this division has led theorists to either place their moral theories in the realm of rationality or in the realm of subjective desire. In the field of psychology, this dichotomization has historically resulted in the creation of theories of mind that emphasize how the tension between rational and subjective is fundamental to human cognition.
The valuation and devaluation of thinking or feeling is often a major defining aspect of a given philosophy. The over-valuing of reason has a long illustrious lineage of proponents including Plato, Saint Augustine, and Freud. Each held that reasoned thinking was the superior manner of mental functioning. Reason was held as the royal road to the highest levels of human understanding, leading to an understanding of the transcendent Ideals of Plato; the road to understanding God’s will for Augustine; a triumph over our dark animal instincts for Freud. These strivings for rationality were fueled by the Enlightenment of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries when scientism came to the fore.
Contrary to the schools of thought that over-valued reason, there has also been a lineage of thinkers that valued feeling and emotion over thinking and reason. In opposition to Plato, stood the pre-Socratic epicureans who held that feeling was paramount. In contrast to Augustinian rationality, is a host of Christian mystics pursuing the quest for rapture. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Romantic counter-response to the Enlightenment epitomizes the anti-rational movement. Romanticism prejudiced sentimentality and affectivity over rationality, and held them to reign supreme.
Not all of the ancients over-valued one or the other mental function of reason or passion. Aristotle held that reason serves to help us understand and develop access to the deeper essential passions of our being. Aristotle saw reason as the key to moral understanding because reason could allow for engagement with the passions. He held that only reason could lead to an understanding of the higher passions. Aristotle’s focus on reason does not imply that we should use our reason to override or devalue passion, but rather to understand the passions.
Aristotle focused on using passion to fuel reason and to use reason to understand passion. To some degree, Aristotle presages the current views of moral psychology. Contemporary perspectives no longer view thinking and feeling as opposed to mental events, but rather as two functions working in concert. For example, reason in the absence of passion tends to be vacuous; and, without passion, there is little motivation to inspire focused purposeful thinking. Through a balance of our passions and reason, we attain moral intelligence.
Rather than viewing the mind as having two distinct ways of functioning, we can construe mental functioning as occurring along a continuum with unemotional thinking at one end and unthinking feeling at the other. Very little of our mental life will lie at either extreme; most mental events are going to be mostly thinking with a little feeling, or feeling with a little thinking. Mental events that lie in the range of mostly rational thought will generate reflection on facts and rational beliefs. Mental events that are comprised more of emotion will be held as subjective feelings and desires. We experience mental events that have a balance between emotion and as thoughts with passion.
Where our thoughts and feeling combine in some equal measure, we experience the resulting passion as a compelling desire fueled by reinforcing feelings and facts. The truth associated with this passion does not allow for easy mutability and contributes to the difficulty in managing conflicts based on values. This conflict can often arise between people; but equally potent is the inner tension we can experience in the face of our own competing values. The immutability of inner competing senses of truth and value are the source of moral anguish and the pain of deep ambivalence. In order to resolve these moral dilemmas one must develop moral intelligence.
Developing Moral Intelligence
Moral intelligence requires an integration of thinking and feeling. Efforts to assert one capacity over the other will be problematic. Moral intelligence is the ability to struggle through a dilemma without artificially forcing the decision by denial of facts or denial of feelings. Attempting to resolve a moral dilemma based on emotions alone can lead to dire consequences. Often, decisions based on feelings are impulsive and short-sighted. As strongly as we may feel compelled to follow our feelings, such action rarely has long-term viability. Yet, many people faced with important value-based choices will base the decision on what they feel compelled to do. Emotions have a strong motivating element and, without the mitigating influence of reason, feelings invariably result in action. At the extreme of emotion-based decision-making are the actions of zealots and extremists who are compelled to act on their feelings regardless of the consequences.
An individual will not be any better served by being purely rational. Deliberation of moral choices with no guiding passion leads to paralysis or obsession. Rational deliberation in the absence of intuitive passion and desire can be aimless. Trying to make moral judgments based on pure reason often results in paralysis because most options have some rational support. Using only reason to solve a moral dilemma often leads to painful obsession. The person who is trapped in obsessing about a moral choice is unable to make the needed commitment to any of the possible courses of action.
Genuine moral intelligence is an integration of passion and reason, not an oscillation between them. Often people oscillate between periods of paralyzed rational deliberation and impulsive, intuitive, emotional action. For example, a person after being paralyzed with unimpassioned deliberation might resort to making a choice just to break free of the frustration. Often, such a choice will be based on passion and feeling without any rational deliberation involved. The use of passion here is merely to avoid struggling further with the moral dilemma. The choice is reactive to the frustration of the passionless deliberation. After such an impassioned choice, there is a tendency to revert to unimpassioned deliberation. This shift sets the stage for obsession and paralysis. Oscillating between these two types of thinking is not adaptive. Adaptive moral judgments emerge from a moral process that is both passionate and deliberative.
The capacity to integrate rational deliberation with emotional passion requires a deep understanding of oneself. First, we each need to develop our capacity to tolerate and use our emotions. Rather than merely being reactive to our emotions, we must cultivate the ability to learn what our emotions are telling us. We need to see emotions not just as calls to action, but also as sources of information. Emotions inform us about our needs, what we can tolerate, and provide feedback about what is good for us and what is bad for us. When we approach emotions with curiosity, we are less reactive and able to tolerate some discomfort or frustration. Additionally, being able to tolerate our emotions opens up a wider range of feelings to inform and guide us. By recognizing emotions as informative, we can begin to differentiate between passions that help us flourish from passions that are reactive, based in prior conditioning.
In addition to such emotional self-awareness, we must develop an awareness of our rational biases. Development of moral intelligence requires a capacity for self-reflection, to understand our personal history from a psychological perspective, as well as a cultural one. A perspectival view of our history can shed light on how certain life experiences contributed to the development of perceptual and cognitive filters. The scope of reflection includes our current circumstances, as well as our early life history and our socio-cultural environment. This self-reflection helps us appreciate how our life history has interacted with our temperament in creating mental filters that bias our understanding. We experience these filters as deep-seated prejudices or expectations—products of a lifetime of conditioning and reinforcement.
Explicating the nature of these filters is one of the goals of moral psychology and moral philosophy. By understanding how we acquire these filters, we can come to semi-objectively reflect on our existing moral judgments. Perspective on our values will always be tied to our subjective experience, but when we can see the shifts in our subjectivity throughout life, we can more easily appreciate the contextual nature of even our deepest beliefs and values. This engagement with our current and past moral self is a form of self-deliberation.
Self-reflection and deliberation require perspective because of the powerful intuitive feelings associated with our beliefs and values. We often experience moral judgment as emerging from an intuition of rightness or wrongness. This type of subjective experience correlates with a judgment based predominantly on passion and with less on deliberation. We may not even experience this unreflected-upon belief as a judgment, but may experience it as Truth. Under these conditions, deliberation is nearly impossible since we may be unable to see that our view of Truth is our view, and any deliberation will be a struggle.
When we adopt a rigid belief system rather than struggling with feelings and genuine deliberation, we may be precluded from using our moral judgment for making creative and growth-producing choices. If our choice is directed by a tightly-held rationale or passionate belief, there can be little, if any, flexibility. Without the moral intelligence for passionate and rational deliberation, our choices in life can become rigid and constricted.
Wisdom and flourishing includes being flexible and perspectival, attributes that we develop through increasing our moral intelligence.