Moral Disgust

Purity rules and discourses are present in all three Abrahamic religions, serving as a medium in structuring their moral, social and ritual worlds and in constructing the holiness of the religious community, religious spaces and the individual body. Purity and defilement govern the management of the individual body versus the community: in eating, defecation, illness, sexual relations, birth and death, in attitudes towards foreigners and heretics, and in the understanding of the demonic. However, ritual and moral purity were used in different ways by the various traditions. Thus while in Judaism and Islam ritual purity is the main medium, in Christianity ritual purity is typically overlaid by moral purity discourse

How are perceptions of morality and disgust regarding meat consumption related to each other? Which factor is more salient in determining one's willingness to eat the meat of a specific animal?  How do these answers vary across religious groups? This study investigates the ways that concepts like morality and disgust are related to food preferences and hopes to shed light on the mechanisms that enforce culturally sanctioned food taboos. The study compares 4 groups of people in the U.S.: Christians (n = 39), Hindus (n = 29), Jews (n = 23), and non-religious people (n = 63).  A total of 154 participants were given surveys in which they rated their feelings about eating various animals. Data from Christian and non-religious groups exhibited similar patterns such as a high likelihood of eating a given animal when starving, while results from Jews and Hindus were consistent with their religion's respective food taboos. Despite these differences, morality and disgust are strongly correlated with one another in almost all instances. Moreover, morality and disgust are almost equally important considerations when determining willingness to eat when starving.

Ph.D-Thesis, Defended February 8, 2016
Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen

Evaluation commitee:
Professor Heidi L. Maibom, Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati.
Professor Arne Johan Vetlesen, Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo.
Professor Dan Zahavi (chair), Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen.

Academic advisor: Thomas Brudholm, Minority Studies, University of Copenhagen
Co-Advisor: Søren Gosvig Olesen, Philosophy, University of Copenhagen

Abstract: Some soldiers experience strong emotional outbursts and bodily discomfort – such as disgust, dizziness, fainting, nausea, vomiting and crying – in the moment of committing or witnessing atrocities. This dissertation delivers a systematic examination of this complex phenomenon that I call “perpetrator disgust”. The central point of dispute is the moral significance of perpetrator disgust. Does the perpetrator’s bodily response indicate a subliminal awareness of the moral wrong of the act? I argue that perpetrator disgust can in some cases reflect a moral conflict, but warn against conflating it with a committed moral judgment.

Although disgust is commonly classified as one of the basic human emotions (Ekman 2003), it has received relatively little attention from linguists in comparison to other emotions. The aim of the paper is to compare and contrast the conceptual metaphors used to express disgust in English and Polish. In line with cognitive linguistics, it is assumed that emotion language is highly figurative and emotions in general are frequently conceptualized through metaphors. However, these metaphors often differ between various cultures and speech communities (Kövecses 2005, 2010 /2002/). The study is based on examples extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and Narodowy Korpus Języka Polskiego. The gathered material allowed the author to suggest a classification of the disgust metaphors in English and Polish, and to identify the similarities and differences in the use of disgust metaphors in these two languages.

In genocide studies, as well as in literary and cinematic representations of mass atrocity, scholars and artists have been concerned with soldiers who experience a physiological and emotional breakdown while committing atrocities. These reactions often resemble disgust responses: perpetrators feel nausea; they convulse and sometimes vomit.

This is book chapter is published in the anthology Emotions and Mass Atrocity: Philosophical and Theoretical Explorations, editors Thomas Brudholm and Johannes Lang, Cambridge University Press, March 2018

This paper calls into question the idea that moral disgust is usefully regarded as a form of genuine disgust. This hypothesis is questionable even if, as some have argued, the spread of moral norms through a community makes use of signaling mechanisms that are central to core disgust. The signaling system is just one part of disgust, and may well be completely separable from it. Moreover, there is plausibly a significant difference between the cognitive scientist’s concept of an emotion and the everyday notion of that emotion. Finally, even if, as this paper contests, some form of disgust were directly elicited by the moral wrongness of certain kinds of behavior, research on the socio-moral elicitors of the disgust mechanism would still be unlikely to shed much direct light on the nature or content of morality.

In this paper, I consider the relationship that obtains between disgust and the idea of a just society. Contra Martha C. Nussbaum, who argues that disgust poses dangers to a just society, I contend that disgust can either damage or promote the construction of a just society. In fact, I largely agree with Nussbaum’s perspective on disgust, except for this point: disgust, I think, is not necessarily dangerous for a just society, but can also be useful and constitute an important element for its development. In order to justify my claim, first, I will comment on Nussbaum’s criticism of disgust. Second, I will analyse Paul Rozin and April E. Fallon’s seminal study on disgust, which Nussbaum’s own research fully presupposes. Third, I will outline a slightly different, indeed “holistic” view on disgust, and bring forward some arguments for the use of disgust in order to construct a just society.

Based on the empirical findings correlating disgust with conservatism, most disgust scholars have fed arguments for its moral unreliability and concluded with moral condemnation of this emotion. In this paper, I will examine common arguments about whether relying on disgust in the moral domain is to be considered good or bad. I will problematize the suggestion that we are justified in firmly believing that disgust is an ethically «dumb» – or an ethically «smart» – emotion. It rather seems that moral disgust can be rational or irrational, pro-social or anti-social, liberal or conservative depending on the eliciting contexts, and that such case-by-case conclusions rely on additional meta-ethical premises.

It is the late middle ages; in central Italy in the Tuscan city of Arezzo, and Piero della Francesca has taken over work on the frescoes of the cycle Legend of the True Cross from his predecessor, Bicci di Lorenzo. In a digression from the narrative of the earliest works that began the cycle, della Francesca chooses in a single fresco panel to depict a Jew: pulled up by his hair, he is belittled by the wooden framework of a block and tackle that raises him from the confinement of a dry well, and he is judged by the condescension of a sanctimonious official. The iconography of the cycle as a whole will not be discussed in this paper, but instead this single panel Torment of the Jew (1452-1466), and how it demonstrates both racial prejudice as a derivative of moral and physical disgust; and by merit of its location in the cycle, a religious condoning of that racial prejudice. The theories of evolutionary psychology will be applied to this demonstrated disgust emotion, to locate the emotion within a medieval setting.
For the graphic, check these Youtube links: http://youtu.be/KhV79HqYm10?list=UUPsskhY91T3Rtc6JRP58X4Q
and:
http://youtu.be/7igejO9eOVg?list=UUPsskhY91T3Rtc6JRP58X4Q

Consider a man who steals money left by his parents for his newborn child and spends it on gambling and alcohol. What is your reaction to this story? I would conjecture that the reaction, in some at least, would be most accurately described as “moral disgust.” However, some have questioned the existence of moral disgust. It has been argued that so-called moral disgust is either not really moral or not really disgust. Are moral disgust skeptics correct? If not, what makes an affective response an instance of moral disgust? Its cause? Its object? Its phenomenal qualities? All of the above? Those are the questions I propose to answer here. I will argue that there is a distinct emotional response best described as “moral disgust.” I will go on to offer an account of its constitutive features.

In this article, we carry out a review of disgust in healthcare contexts (healthcare staff and patients), a topic not studied enough yet. To this end, we first accomplish a brief presentation of disgust biological and socio-moral elements, which allow us to understand the role of disgust in patients' rejection of their own wounds and self-healing. Disgust can lead patients to refuse self-care treatments after surgery or refuse to carry out diagnostic tests. On the other hand, health professionals are not exempt from feeling disgust because they are in contact with factors that cause it, which may conflict with professional ethics and the duty of care. In addition, we present the preliminary results of a pilot study in which we show what causes disgust in doctors and nurses and how they deal with it. The results point to compensation strategies that could affect the quality of care. In this sense, it is necessary to highlight the differences between the factors that cause disgust, since on many oc-casions they are not due to the disease, but to the lack of hygiene on patient´s side. In short, due to disgust, the patients could refuse to heal their wounds on their own and due to this same emotion doctors may feel discomfort in attending the patients.

People who are more avoidant of pathogens are more politically conservative, as are nations with greater parasite stress. In the current research, we test two prominent hypotheses that have been proposed as explanations for these relationships. The first, which is an intragroup account, holds that these relationships between pathogens and politics are based on motivations to adhere to local norms, which are sometimes shaped by cultural evolution to have pathogen-neutralizing properties. The second, which is an intergroup account, holds that these same relationships are based on motivations to avoid contact with outgroups, who might pose greater infectious disease threats than ingroup members. Results from a study surveying 11,501 participants across 30 nations are more consistent with the intragroup account than with the intergroup account. National parasite stress relates to traditionalism (an aspect of conservatism especially related to adherence to group norms) but not to social dominance orientation (SDO; an aspect of conservatism especially related to endorsements of intergroup barriers and negativity toward ethnic and racial outgroups). Further, individual differences in pathogen-avoidance motives (i.e., disgust sensitivity) relate more strongly to traditionalism than to SDO within the 30 nations. political ideology | pathogens | disgust | culture | evolutionary psychology

In this article, we carry out a review of disgust in healthcare contexts (healthcare staff and patients), a topic not studied enough yet. To this end, we first accomplish a brief presentation of disgust biological and socio-moral elements, which allow us to understand the role of disgust in patients' rejection of their own wounds and self-healing. Disgust can lead patients to refuse self-care treatments after surgery or refuse to carry out diagnostic tests. On the other hand, health professionals are not ex-empt from feeling disgust because they are in contact with factors that cause it, which may conflict with professional ethics and the duty of care. In addition, we present the preliminary results of a pilot study in which we show what causes disgust in doctors and nurses and how they deal with it. The results point to compensation strategies that could affect the quality of care. In this sense, it is necessary to highlight the differences between the factors that cause disgust, since on many occasions they are not due to the disease, but to the lack of hygiene on patient´s side. In short, due to disgust, the patients could refuse to heal their wounds on their own and due to this same emotion doctors may feel discomfort in attending the patients.

The reviewed book treats disgust as a model emotion that shields humans from “body-snatchers” — parasites and viruses. While understandable from the point of view of virologists and hygienists, Val Curtis’ arguments are not too convincing for anthropologists. Bodily fluids, which the author treats as universal objects of fear and disgust, are not perceived by traditional cultures as dangerous, but as potent substances, malevolent or benevolent in different situations. While sharing the ability of other bodily fluids to spread infections, milk and tears have exemplary positive connotations in human culture, which gives them no place in the reviewed book.
Keywords: disgust, anthropology of the body, ethology, epidemiology, hygiene, body liquids, human behavior, emotions.

Disgust involves both automatic and conscious evaluative processing, so using a combination of explicit and implicit disgust measures, we sought to predict higher conception risk by the measurement of the perceptions toward disgusting things associated with sexual interaction in pre-menopausal females. We hypothesised that disgust for the bodily fluids involved in sexual interaction would be downgraded, and that disgust for lower-genetic value reproductive mates would be upgraded (Tybur, Lieberman, Kurzban, & DeScioli, 2013) to collectively predict higher conception risk. Specifically, we measured explicit disgust using the Three Domain Disgust Scale (TDDS; Tybur, Lieberman, & Griskevicius, 2009), and implicit disgust using a Go/No-Go Association Task (Nosek & Banaji, 2001). Menstrual cycle position was defined using probability for conception risk (Wilcox, Dunson, Weinberg, Trussell, & Baird, 2001) in an undergraduate university sample N = 50 females (M = 24.1 years, SD = 6.65 years). Following forced-entry regression analysis, hypothesised predictors were not statistically significant in this sample; however, the Moral Domain of the TDDS was a statistically significant correlate with high conception risk t(44) = 2.437, p = .019, ƒ2 =.17. Finding was not consistent with previous menstrual cycle and disgust studies, but adds to empirical data for moral disgust and ovulatory shift hypothesis.

My (English) comments for a symposium on Serena Feloj's book (Italian): Estetica del disgusto. Mendelssohn, Kant e i limiti della rappresentazione (Carocci 2017). The comments were written for the online forum, Critique. (published July 15, 2019)
Original link:
https://virtualcritique.wordpress.com/2019/07/15/robert-r-clewis-on-serena-felojs-estetica-del-disgusto/

Alongside the public and private, the sacred can represent a third social-political dispensation, as Raymond Geuss notes. The modern liberal public/private divide represents a historical anomaly, with the sacred putatively consigned to the private realm. However, recent empirical research into disgust and its influences on moral psychology casts doubt on the extent to which such schemes have in fact removed phenomena connected with the sacred from the public realm. In this paper, I argue for the continuity between disgust and the idea of ritual pollution, demonstrating how an understanding of the moral psychology of the latter phenomenon helps account for certain aspects of our ostensibly secular public realm. Of these aspects, I focus primarily on racism, and specifically individuals’ avowals of disgust in response to racism in the contemporary USA and UK. I argue that the idea of ritual pollution shows that such a response indicates a number of potential drawbacks to the socio-moral scheme underpinning the disgust, which in turn have the potential to limit social efforts to eradicate racism. I conclude that such socio-moral disgust is itself morally questionable in important ways, in addition to having the aforementioned instrumental shortcomings.

Empirical research indicates that feelings of disgust actually affect our moral beliefs and moral motivations. The question is, should they? Daniel Kelly argues that they should not. More particularly, he argues for what we may call the irrelevancy thesis and the anti-moralization thesis. According to the irrelevancy thesis, feelings of disgust should be given no weight when judging the moral character of an action (or norm, practice, outcome, or ideal).  According to the anti-moralization thesis, feelings of disgust should not be allowed a role in, or harnessed in the service of, moral motivation.  In this paper, I will argue against both theses, staking out a moderate position according to which feelings of disgust can (but needn’t always) play a proper role in aid of moral belief formation and moral motivation.

Abstract: This article contends that analyses of the modernity of fat stigmatization in the West – as a largely visual matter that foregrounds size and appearance – must also include a consideration of the materiality of fat as an historically ambiguous substance, the qualities of which have played an important role in structuring perceptions of corpulence since the early modern era. This broad claim is supported by a correspondingly wide-ranging analysis of how ideas about human fat in Britain and France vacillated over time between an appreciation for its vital intrinsic qualities and its troubled status as a form of greasy ‘excrement’ that frustrated the hygienic and racial self-perceptions of white elites. This is supplemented by a brief exploration of the colonial aspect of fat intolerance, specifically the powerful links being forged towards the end of the eighteenth century between certain non-western cultures and an appreciation of grease and corpulence. This largely neglected racial dimension may prove key to understanding some of the strong reactions that fat would come to elicit by the twentieth century. Approaching fat in such ways entails a rapprochement between constructivist theories of the body and recent work on materiality emerging from anthropology and archaeology. By attending to the materiality of fat this article proposes a more complex historical understanding of the development of stereotypes about corpulence.

Most contemporary research on disgust can be divided into “disgust advocates” and “disgust skeptics.” The so-called advocates argue that disgust can have a positive influence on our moral judgment; skeptics warn that it can mislead us toward prejudice and discrimination. This article compares this disagreement to a structurally similar debate in the field of genocide studies concerning the phenomenon of “perpetrator abhorrence.” While some soldiers report having felt strong disgust in the moment of committing or witnessing atrocity, scholars disagree on whether such disgust is moral in nature. These empirical cases provide us with reasons to reconsider the normative features of disgust. Inspired by the conceptualization of disgust in Immanuel Kant and Aurel Kolnai, and as an alternative to both the disgust advocates and the skeptics, this article argues that the analogy of a stop sign can better help us define disgust responses.

The rhetoric of disgust is common in moral discourse and political propaganda. Some believe it's pernicious, for it convinces without evidence. But scientific research now suggests that disgust is typically an effect, not a cause, of moral judgment. At best the emotion on its own only sometimes slightly amplifies a moral belief one already has. Appeals to disgust are thus dialectically unhelpful in discourse that seeks to convince. When opponents of abortion use repulsive images to make their case, they convince few, even if they rally their base. When champions of animal rights show graphic depictions of the torturous conditions of animals in factory farms, they convince only those previously ignorant of the severity of such conditions. Ultimately, disgust may be less pernicious than it is useless.

This paper comprises four studies that aim to offer empirical support to Freudian and Lacanian theories on addictions on samples of female nicotine addicts. The two authors argue (as summarized by Loose in 2002) that the individuals who had relational issues with their main caregiver in their preverbal stages of development did not acquire the ability to obtain satisfaction in social interactions due to their poor relational skills; this increases their propensity toward becoming addicts, because addiction is seen as a manner of circumventing the other in the process of obtaining satisfaction. Our results support these theoretical claims in what regards nicotine addiction in women. The implications of our findings suggest that therapeutic interventions for nicotine addicts should be focused on the individual rather than on the object of the addiction itself, as the individual etiology of nicotine addiction seems to vary from one addict to another according to their previous experiences in attachment relationships.

ABSTRACT Participants from three countries (United States, India, and Bulgaria) rated the socio-structural context between their nation and China. We explored the relationship between the components of the intergroup context (permeability, stability, and legitimacy) and five group-based emotions (happiness, fear, contempt, jealousy, and disgust) across these three international relationships. Overall, the results showed that socio-structural intergroup characteristics interact to differentially influence the intensity of reported group-based emotions. The intensity and predictors of each group-based emotion were also found to differ for each country. Together, these results show that simultaneously examining different socio-structural variables yields a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between the intergroup context and the emotions derived from group membership.

This article addresses two topics related to disgust in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche: (1) how moral disgust is harmful and (2) to what extent moral disgust is conditionally fitting. Nietzsche argues that self-disgust is dangerous because it is characteristic of ascetic morality. Yet disgust is conditionally fitting insofar as it triggers an adverse reaction to ascetic moral systems, or what I have called "disgusting moralities." The first section is a general analysis of the role of self-disgust in the cultivation of ascetic morality. In the second section, I compare this analysis of disgust to two popular contemporary theories of disgust (the Terror Management and Animal-Nature Reminder theories). In the third section, I argue that Nietzsche advocates disgust at certain harmful moral systems. He thinks disgust is a fitting emotion for such moral systems because it causes an immediate adverse reaction. This reaction is fitting, Nietzsche thinks, because such moral systems are infectious. I maintain his view of disgust is compatible with convincing psychological theories of disgust, namely the Entanglement Thesis and Co-Opt Thesis.

Negli ultimi anni, soprattutto sulla scorta degli studi sulla contaminazione iniziati da Mary Douglas, l’antropologia si è molto occupata del disgusto, emozione di base già ampiamente studiata negli ambiti della psicologia per i suoi interessanti risvolti psico-sociali. In questo articolo riprenderemo alcuni di questi studi per offrire una riflessione filosofica sul ruolo di questa emozione tanto complessa, argomentando come il disgusto possa servire per comprendere meglio il modo in cui il soggetto interagisce con il mondo, co-costruendo se stesso e ciò che lo circonda attraverso sofisticate operazioni classificatorie successivamente incorporate e, iterativamente, messe di nuovo in gioco nell’incessante progetto che è il fare cultura.