Every Sunday the Boston Globe has a column in the "Ideas" section that's pretty useful: "Uncommon Knowledge" by Kevin Lewis. This section has paragraph blurbs about the key ideas from recent research.
On Sunday, July 31, 2011, "Uncommon Knowledge" had an entry titled "For an ethical decision, don't think." (It's the third paragraph down.) It's about a study that tested what happened when people thought about the right thing to do, or just acted on their feelings. Turns out people do right more often then they don't think about it!
In other words, as study author Chen-Bo Zhong states in his abstract: Recent developments in moral psychology, however, suggest that moral functions involved in ethical decision making are metaphorical and embodied. The research presented here suggests that deliberative decision making may actually increase unethical behaviors and reduce altruistic motives when it overshadows implicit, intuitive influences on moral judgments and decisions.
So, DO what FEELS right -- you've got the gut sense to know better!
Original study by Chen-Bo Zhong: The Ethical Dangers of Deliberative Decision Making in Administrative Science Quarterly (March 2011).
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