Are emotion and reason equally necessary in justifying moral decisions?
Consent is the basis of moral and ethical decisions affecting people and relationships. We cannot know everything, but if we listen to one another, we can check and balance our decisions, mediate, and agree upon the best solutions based on all available input, information and considerations. So long as we take into account any objections from ourselves or others and resolve those, decisions made by consensus satisfy both emotion and logic without contradicting one or the other. This is the ideal. So both reason and emotion are necessary for this process. Reason or logic helps us to sort out what is contradictory and what would satisfy all conditions to maximize the good, minimize the suffering or sacrifice, and verify where the parties affected agree is equally fair to all concerned. However, emotions can guide us into the past or future, to ideas beyond our conscious knowledge, that we may not otherwise consider in the equation. Intuition plays a far greater role in decisions than our
