humean passions v kantian reason

Winter break has given me time to read two really interesting books. First is Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. Among the many things Haidt does in this work, he defends the view that most of our moral/religious/political beliefs are driven by our intuitions. We first encounter a question, have an intuition about it, form a judgment about our intuition, and then we engage in post hoc reasoning to rationalize our initial intuition. 

The second book I've been able to read over break is Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. Here, MacIntyre offers a historical sketch of Haidt's view that our intuitions play a large role in our judgments. He draws on the works of Kant and Hume to suggest that there's a general divide on how we should form our moral judgment. Kant thinks moral judgments should be the products of our use of reason; that is, we ought to think about which sorts of actions are ones we could universalize. In contrast, Hume is like Haidt with respect to our moral judgments. He thinks whenever we express a moral judgment about a particular action, we are expressing our feelings about the action. Unlike the Kantian view, Hume takes it that rationality doesn't play much of a role at all with respect to these sorts of judgments. 

It seems like the Haidt/Hume view is descriptively right but normatively wrong (or at least under-developed). It just seems like most people engage in the sort of post hoc reasoning that Haidt thinks we do. But, ironically, this isn't just an intuition; Haidt cites all kinds of studies that suggest this view is correct. One entertaining study Haidt cites is an examination in which two different groups assess a series of moral dilemmas. The catch is that one of the groups is in an area that is filled with fart spray, such that they're inhaling disgusting odors as they assess the situations. It turned out that the fart spray group condemned the moral dilemmas at an overwhelmingly higher rate than the other group. This is just one of many studies that suggest that our judgments are usually formed out of intuitions that aren't based on rationality.

I'm not sure what I think about this just yet; maybe I'll comment on it later. But I found MacIntyre's discussion interesting.