Introduction

Intuition plays a central role in our ethical and moral judgments and, consequently, in the formulation of policy guidelines. Which benefits are worth what costs, which losses are tolerable and which not, and what are some of the more pressing societal issues are all problems that lend themselves to certain amounts of empirical research, but eventually they depend on people's values and intuitive judgment. Some of the most poignant policy debates of our time-for example, those surrounding active or passive euthanasia, abortion, or social welfare programs-rely on arguments (concerning the quality of life worth living, the difference between killing versus letting die, when life begins or ends, societal obligations to the less fortunate, etc.) whose main function is to appeal to moral intuition. The appeal to intuition is common, and often central to policy formulation and conduct. Nevertheless, human intuition can be fickle, and sometimes in predictable and systematic ways.

This chapter is unabashedly descriptive in its treatment of intuition. It focuses on a number of systematic, well-documented aspects of the psychology that underlies people's intuition; it ignores philosophical quandaries such as whether there are moral facts or facts about rationality and whether we have intuitive, perceptual, or other privileged access to such facts. Of concern will be the systematic ways in which preferences and intuitions can change as a result of supposedly inconsequential differences in the manner in which problems are presented, and the implications that this has for the formulation and conduct of policy.