 Where the early sentimentalists gesture towards divine providence when it comes to explaining why we have a moral sense and why it approves of things like benevolence, Haidt’s story appeals to evolution. He believes we are pre-programmed to respond to suffering with compassion, the arrogance of subordinates with contempt, cheating with anger, and impurity with disgust, for example. These culturally fine-tuned affective responses are in turn distally explained by having been evolutionary “adaptations to long-standing threats and opportunities in social life” of our ancestors (Haidt 2012).