Comparing Haidt's Views On Sentiment And Social Intuition

Sentiment and Social Intuition David Hume (1711-1776) believes that morality is based on sentiment, or feelings and emotions. In other words, when you feel that something is right or wrong, it is because you were taught that it was right or wrong. When researching Hume, I found the agent, receiver, and the spectator distinction: a product of earlier moral sense theories. The agent is the person that performs an action, the receiver is the person affected by the action, and the spectator is the person who observes and approves or disapproves of the action. (Fieser) The idea of sentiment is that we can perceive the outcomes of actions through our feelings. Whoever raises you, teaches you how to perceive your feelings of right or wrong. Sentiment
Haidt supports his model by doing a series of experiments and presenting some scenarios that are hard to rationally justify, but people would easily be able to say how morally wrong they are. He gives the example of brother and sister incest. People react first off by saying that it is very wrong, then they start giving reasons of why it is wrong and if their reasons are contradicted, they come up with other reasons. When all their reasons were taken away, some people began to laugh and look puzzled because they are expecting to find more reasons, but can’t. Haidt called this “moral dumbfounding,” and a lot of the people decided to say that they don’t know why it is wrong, but it just is. Overall, knowing that something is wrong and explaining that it is wrong are separate processes and people hold their beliefs separate from how they justify something.
Just as our tongues make us respond to fruit and meat and our bodies feel the pleasure of fruit and meat in the physical world, our minds make us feel pleasure or displeasure and dislike in the social world. When we dislike something, it is a signal to avoid it. Haidt describes the pleasure and warm feeling you get when seeing a heroic act or an act of self-sacrifice as “moral elevation.” We are more likely to trust these types of people and get to know them based on the pleasure we feel, whereas when you feel displeasure or dislike in a person, you stay away from them and don’t trust them. Haidt connects this concept by saying that “just as our tongues guide us to good foods and away from bad foods, our minds guide us to good people, away from bad people.”