Popular historical advocates of some version of the moral sense theory or sentimentalism include the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), David Hume (1711–1776), and Adam Smith (1723–1790).
Some contemporary advocates include Michael Slote, Justin D'Arms, Daniel Jacobson, Jesse Prinz, Jonathan Haidt, and perhaps John McDowell.
However, the terminology is not ultimately important, so long as one keeps in mind the relevant differences between these two models of non-inferential moral knowledge.)
All orthodox interpretations of Confucianism accept this view, several unorthodox groups make a point of refuting it (see: Xunzi).
This line of thinking reached its most extreme iteration in xinxue, a form of Neo-Confucianism associated with the Ming Dynasty and Wang Yangming.
In the West, the first prominent moral sense theory is found in Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713).
His major work espousing a form of moral sense theory is An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit (first published in an unauthorized edition in 1699).
The chief statements of his theory occur in An Inquiry Concerning the Original of Our Ideas of Virtue or Moral Good (1725; Treatise II of An Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue) and An Essay On the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, With Illustrations Upon the Moral Sense (1728).
Thomas Reid (1710–1796) defends moral sense theory in his Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind.
The moral sense is often described as providing information in a way analogous to other sensory modalities, such as sight in the perception of colors.
Since we can in principle build mechanical detectors for all these natural properties, the ethical naturalist thinks wrongness is something that a machine could eventually detect.
The ethical intuitionist typically disagrees (although, it is not essential to the view): they see a wide conceptual gap between natural facts and evaluations.