Should we depend more on reason or emotion when making moral decisions?

Imagine walking into a restaurant and seeing the most beautiful, drool-inducing sandwich you have ever seen in your entire life. The sandwich has the fluffiest-looking top and a crunchy-looking bottom. However, there is some sort of fabulous-looking meat in the middle that isn’t listed anywhere on the menu. Being the devoted Muslim that you are, you ask the waiter what kind of meat it is, and you are told that it is halal chicken. Luckily for you, that means the sandwich is merely minutes away from being devoured. You take a bite of that delicious sandwich and are pleasantly surprised to learn that it is just as delicious as the picture looked. You’re feeling good! Now, one of the chefs walks out of the kitchen to clock out for the day and recognizes you as a devout Muslim. He looks at the sandwich you are eating and is in shock as he realizes the waiter made. The meat in there is most definitely not halal chicken, and is in reality pork, which is the one meat you swore to never eat again after becoming Muslim.

For the chef, there are two ways to approach this situation in a much more logic-oriented manner. The first being to take a more utilitarian approach, and telling the customer to enjoy the sandwich and go on with their day. Utilitarianism is the ideology that doing the most happiness for the most people is the most moral thing to do, which sounds great in theory, but in reality, is not as simple. If the chef were to tell the customer that the sandwich that they seem to be pleasantly enjoying is one of the worst mistakes they’ve ever made, it would likely not be a very happy thing for the customer to hear. However, if the chef decided to turn a blind eye to this situation, the customer would likely happily finish the sandwich while leaving a big fat tip as they get up to leave. The chef may have his mood slightly spoiled for the rest of his week, but overall, there would be much more happiness. (For this scenario, let’s assume that the restaurant gets blown up the next day, and this customer never learns about the mixup.) Most people would agree that this is most definitely not the moral thing to do, but why? What went wrong here?

The second way to approach this situation logically would be to abide by Immanuel Kant’s moral imperatives. According to Kant, no matter the situation, you should never lie. As simple as that, the chef would go up to the customer and tell him that the sandwich he is eating is, in reality, pork. Now, this leads to another major question regarding moral dilemmas. If the only intention of the chef when telling the customer the truth was to tell the truth, then would that make it a moral decision? If, for example, a person solely told the truth for the sake of telling the truth, would that make them more moral than a person who only occasionally tells the truth when they believe it’s more right to?

Now, the final way to approach this situation is to favor your emotions in the decision-making process and tell the customer the truth out of a mix of pride and compassion. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics states that happiness is not a mood or temporary state, but rather the culmination of achievements you have received through virtuous actions. What does this mean? To Aristotle, happiness is not when you aced that math test and ended the class with a shining A+ (still waiting for this to happen for me), but instead that moment when you can’t fall asleep one night and think back on all the happy and proud moments you had in life and fall asleep with a dumb grin on your face. If the chef believed in this school of thought, they would buckle down and acknowledge that temporary emotions don’t make up happiness. They would also be proud to know their actions are virtuous, and tell the truth to the customer.

Are any of these the right/moral thing to do? We will never know. Each scenario will end up with some happy and some unhappy, but maybe happiness isn’t even the right way to judge the morality of a decision. Maybe the moral way to deal with the situation ends up with everyone being unhappy. There truly is no way to resolve this dichotomy, and leaning toward either side will always lead to some caveats. Does this mean that the best way to make decisions is using a mix of logic and emotions? To the surprise of many, I believe that it really won’t make any difference. The concept of morality is so subjective that there is no way to definitely determine a decision as immoral. Maybe the real answer all along was to tap into your inner Nietzsche and beat the poor customer up for being religious in the first place. We’ll never really know.