(a) "What really matters for success, character, happiness and lifelong achievements is a definite set of emotional skills — your…

(a) Does EQ matter more than IQ for success, character and happiness?

Largely, yes — with a qualification. Emotional intelligence, in Daniel Goleman's account, is self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill.

Reasons in support:

• Success: most work is done with and through people. Leading teams, negotiating and handling conflict depend on reading and managing emotions.
• Character: self-regulation lets a person resist anger, greed and impulse, so that values translate into conduct.
• Happiness: resilience and the capacity for relationships, both emotional skills, predict well-being better than test scores.

The qualification: IQ is not irrelevant. A doctor, engineer or policy-maker needs analytical ability, and EQ without competence produces pleasant but ineffective people. The two are complements: IQ often decides entry to a profession, EQ decides how far one goes in it. For a civil servant, empathy and composure under pressure — as in managing a riot or a disaster — matter as much as knowledge of rules.

(b) Moral intuition and moral reasoning

Moral intuition is the immediate, felt sense that something is right or wrong, arising without conscious deliberation. Jonathan Haidt's social intuitionist model holds that most moral judgments begin here. Example: instinctively rushing to help an accident victim, or feeling revulsion at a bribe offer before thinking about the law.

Moral reasoning is the slow, conscious weighing of principles, duties and consequences to reach a justified decision — the process Lawrence Kohlberg studied in his stages of moral development. Example: an officer deciding how to allocate scarce ventilators by weighing clinical need, fairness and lives saved; or a judge balancing free speech against public order.

They differ in speed (instant versus deliberate), basis (emotion and habit versus principles) and openness to scrutiny (hard to explain versus explicitly justified). Good conduct needs both: intuition raises the alarm, reasoning tests it against bias and decides.