Recent Social Intuitionist work suggests that moral judgments are intuitive (not based on conscious deliberation or any significant chain of inference), and that the reasons we produce to explain or justify our judgments and actions are for the most part post hoc rationalizations rather than the actual source of those judgments. This is consistent with work on judgment and explanation in other domains, and it correctly challenges one-sidedly rationalistic accounts. We suggest that in fact reasoning has a great deal of influence on moral judgments and on intuitive judgments in general. This influence is not apparent from study of judgments simply in their immediate context, but it is crucial for the question of how cognition can help us avoid deleterious effects and enhance potentially beneficial effects of affect on judgment, action, and cognition itself. We begin with established work on several reactive strategies for cognitive control of affect (e.g., suppression, reappraisal), then give special attention to more complex sorts of conflict (“extended deliberation”) involving multiple interacting factors, both affective and reflective. These situations are especially difficult to study in a controlled way, but we propose some possible experimental approaches. We then review proactive strategies for control, including avoidance of temptation and mindfulness meditation (Froeliger et al., 2012, this issue). We give special attention to the role of slow or “cool” cognitive processes (e.g., deliberation, planning, and executive control) in the inculcation of long-term dispositions, traits, intuitions, skills, or habits. The latter are critical because they in turn give rise to a great many of our fast, intuitive judgments. The reasoning processes involved here are distinct from post hoc rationalizations and have a very real impact on countless intuitive judgments in concrete situations. This calls for a substantial enlargement of research on cognitive control, drawing on work in developmental psychology, automatization, educational theory, and other fields.

The author discusses his experiences as the son of divorced parents, one a proud egoist and the other a dutiful altruist, and the resultant challenges in his own romantic life. Based on research from evolutionary psychology, he argues that ethical egoists and their critics have typically committed the same core error. By imputing a false dichotomy between ‘selfishness’ and ‘altruism,’ all sides have obscured the motivational intricacy of human behavior and the moral nuance entailed. How much of your own needs and happiness should be sacrificed for those you love? Drawing on Aristotelian insight, the author concludes that this is one of the most confounding ethical quandaries in life--which no moral theory can conclusively resolve.

With personal anecdotes, the author contrasts his natural pessimism with the outlook of his mother, a lifelong Pollyanna, and investigates the source of this core difference. He argues that, despite its scientific veracity and likely implications that nothing is cosmically ‘meant to be,’ Darwin’s theory of natural selection neither conclusively resolves metaphysical debates concerning the existence of god nor the existential question of which life perspective is most appropriate. Furthermore, based on interdisciplinary research from the field of positive psychology, the author rejects Jean-Paul Sartre’s alternative suggestion that we are either optimistic or cynical solely by choice. Contrary to Sartre’s ‘blank slate’ conception, these empirical findings indicate that a person’s baseline happiness level and natural outlook on life is genetically driven to a significant degree. While there is a ‘cortical lottery’ in this regard, environmental factors also play a key role a scientific result that fits nicely with Aristotle’s ‘golden mean’ theory of happiness.