 Empathic feelings may enter into the explanation of moral judgment more indirectly, however. Shaun Nichols’s (2004) version of sentimentalism shares the Humean ambition of explaining moral thought without assuming an innate moral capacity or sense. Instead, Nichols assumes that normal people have a generic capacity to be guided by norms or rules of various kinds, and certain non-moral emotional dispositions, such as the disposition to have an aversive response to suffering in others. His hypothesis is that we regard a rule-violation as moral (and thus wrong independently of what anyone tells us to do) rather than conventional (something that owes its status to being prohibited by some local de facto authority) when the rule in question is affect-backed, that is, when it prohibits actions of a type that we independently have a negative emotional reaction towards (Nichols 2004: 62).