“Gut feelings must be understood to be used properly”

Their project, “Should we trust our gut? Embodied Morality: The Role of Bodily Sensations and Emotions in Guiding Moral Decisions” looked at how gut feelings influence moral decision-making. To do this, they spent a year reading philosophical texts and engaging in discussions and debates with one another and their instructor, Alain Pé-Curto.

“It’s nice to activate a different part of your mind”

The group did their project as a culmination of the course “Emotion and value”, one of over 150 courses offered in the College of Humanities’ Social Sciences and Humanities (SHS) program. The course offers philosophical tools and frameworks to understand the search for a meaningful life, focusing on the role of emotions and values in transformative experiences and decision-making. Through lectures, readings, and discussions drawing from various disciplines, students explore how life-defining moments can lead to personal transformation.

The SHS courses are required for all students during their bachelor’s degree as well as during the first year of the master’s degree, offering them a choice of subjects that cover a wide range of humanities and social sciences.

“I think it’s nice to be able to activate a different part of your mind during the day,” says Kathryn Dullerud, who is doing her master’s in statistics. “Taking five math classes is a lot, so this course gave my mind a bit of a rest, but in a way that’s creative and exploratory.”

“I went through all the courses and chose the one that looked the most fun,” says Karim Abi Said, who is completing his master’s in EPFL’s neurotechnology program, NeuroX. “I wanted a course that was very philosophical, very values-based, that was interesting to think about as a person and not as an engineer.”

“A lot of brainstorming”

For their final project, the four students were drawn to the idea of exploring an innate, hard-to-describe feeling, similar to ‘being moved’. This led them to the idea of looking at gut feelings, but they still weren’t exactly sure what it was about gut feelings that they wanted to investigate.

“We did a lot of brainstorming,” Kathryn says. They eventually found an ideal topic in researching how gut feelings impact moral decision-making. “What motivated us was thinking of instances where it might be hard to weed out how you feel about something, so having that physical response can help you navigate what to do.”

“Sometimes you’re not consciously aware of what your morals are until you see something that challenges them,” adds Maximilian Grobbelaar, who is getting his master’s in NeuroX.

As this was a philosophy class, their research required them to do a lot of hard reading, and some debating as well.

“We had a lot of discussions, because each word can have a different meaning,” says Vincent Martignier, who is getting his master’s in physics. “Sometimes we would argue for hours, and it would turn out, we were talking about the same thing.”

“We’re a very passionate group,” adds Kathryn. “We had a lot of discussion and disagreement, so we’d have a discussion one week and then we would go do readings to back up what our point was.”

Gut feelings as a tool for moral behavior

Through their extensive reading and many hours of discussions and debates, they concluded that gut feelings can be used as a tool for moral behavior, but not without context.

“It’s not just a given that because you have these emotions that you can act in a moral way,” says Max. “It’s skill you must develop. It goes hand in hand with understanding why you’re angry, where does it come from, and from there you can understand your gut feeling better. But merely observing the physical sensation without understand the root cause is like shooting in the dark.”

“You must understand where gut feelings come from to properly use them,” adds Vincent.

To illustrate their work, the group gave the example of seeing someone getting attacked on the street. Do you have a gut feeling that you should step in, and if so, is that due to moral structures within yourself? Does your anger at the attack stem from this moral expectation, and how does that manifest physically?

“The root cause of the anger in the moment is our response to a moral transgression occurring,” says Max. “Sometimes you’re not consciously aware of what your morals are until you see something that challenges them.”

The students said that what they learned in the course could impact their personal lives and interactions with others, as well as their understanding of the ethical implications of certain technologies and their uses.

“Sometimes we have a tunnel-vision view of our specific field, but obviously it all exists in the larger world,” says Kathryn. “With all the technical and scientific things that we do, we have to think about the larger impact.”