Social Intuitionism
Haidt's early claim to fame was the research program known as Social intuitionism. According to this view, moral judgments are mostly the products of quick, intuitive evaluations of scenarios with certain content. Moral reasoning is usually a largely post hoc phenomenon. People are, as Haidt says, "intuitive lawyers" whose reasoning usually seeks to vindicate the person's own intuition rather than openly assess the case from an impartial point of view.
However, the view allows that other people's reasoning can affect one's own intuitions. (This seems to mean both the nature of one's intuition at a time and one's dispositions to have intuitions at a later time.) Social reasoning is the typical means by which people's moral views change, when they change, according to Social Intuitionism--this is the 'Social' aspect of the theory.
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Famous quotes containing the word social:
“As the saffron tints and crimson flushes of morn herald the coming day, so the social and political advancement which woman has already gained bears the promise of the rising of the full-orbed sun of emancipation. The result will be not to make home less happy, but society more holy.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)