The moral psychology of disgust

243 Pages·2018·1.294 MB·English

by  Nina Strohminger, Victor Kumar (Eds.)

The Moral Psychology
of Disgust
Moral Psychology of the Emotions
Series editor:
Mark Alfano, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy,
Delft University of Technology
How do our emotions influence our other mental states (perceptions, beliefs,
motivations, intentions) and our behavior? How are they influenced by our
other mental states, our environments, and our cultures? What is the moral
value of a particular emotion in a particular context? This series explores the
causes, consequences, and value of the emotions from an interdisciplinary
perspective. Emotions are diverse, with components at various levels (bio-
logical, neural, psychological, social), so each book in this series is devoted to
a distinct emotion. This focus allows the author and reader to delve into a spe-
cific mental state, rather than trying to sum up emotions en masse. Authors
approach a particular emotion from their own disciplinary angle (e.g., con-
ceptual analysis, feminist philosophy, critical race theory, phenomenology,
social psychology, personality psychology, neuroscience) while connecting
with other fields. In so doing, they build a mosaic for each emotion, evaluat-
ing both its nature and its moral properties.
Other titles in this series:
The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness, edited by Kathryn J. Norlock
The Moral Psychology of Pride, edited by Adam J. Carter and Emma C. Gordon
The Moral Psychology of Sadness, edited by Anna Gotlib
The Moral Psychology of Anger, edited by Myisha Cherry and Owen Flanagan
The Moral Psychology of Contempt, edited by Michelle Mason
The Moral Psychology of Compassion, edited by Justin Caouette
and Carolyn Price
Forthcoming titles in the series:
The Moral Psychology of Curiosity, edited by Ilhan Inan, Lani Watson,
Dennis Whitcomb, and Safiye Yigit
The Moral Psychology of Regret, edited by Anna Gotlib
The Moral Psychology of Gratitude, edited by Robert Roberts
and Daniel Telech
The Moral Psychology
of Disgust
Edited by Nina Strohminger
and
Victor Kumar
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Selection and editorial matter © 2018 by Nina Strohminger and Victor Kumar.
Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB 978-1-78660-298-5
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ISBN: 978-1-78660-298-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-1-78660-300-5 (electronic)
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Contents
Introduction: Disgust: A Cross-Pollination 1
Nina Strohminger and Victor Kumar
PART I: THE SCIENCE OF MORAL DISGUST 9
1 Moralized Disgust versus Disgusting Immorality: An
Adaptationist Perspective 11
Joshua M. Tybur, Catherine Molho, and Daniel Balliet
2 The Social Origins of Disgust 27
Joshua Rottman, Jasmine M. DeJesus, and Emily Gerdin
3 What Disgust Does and Does Not Do for Moral Cognition 53
Jared Piazza, Justin F. Landy, Alek Chakroff,
Liane Young, and Emily Wasserman
4 Disgusting Discrepancies: Moral Disgust as
Threat Compensation 83
Eleanor Hanna and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
5 The Morally Relevant Consequences
of Disgust in the Context of Sexual Assault 103
Laura Niemi
6 How Disgust Becomes Law 121
Carlton Patrick and Debra Lieberman
v
vi Contents
PART II: THE PHILOSOPHY OF MORAL DISGUST 139
7 Gross Violations 141
Carol Hay
8 The Limits of Appealing to Disgust 151
Joshua May
9 Cast in a Bad Light or Reflected in a Dark Mirror? Cognitive
Science and the Projecting Mind 171
Daniel Kelly
10 Putting Our Morals Where Our Mouths Are: Disgust and Food
Ethics 195
Alexandra Plakias
11 Varieties of Disgusting Experience 211
Carolyn Korsmeyer
Index 229
About the Contributors 233
Introduction
Introduction
Disgust: A Cross-Pollination
Nina Strohminger and Victor Kumar
For most of the twentieth century, moral philosophy and moral psychology
had very little to say about disgust.
Partly this was due to a general anti-sentimentalist bent: emotions are
messy, imprecise, and resistant to measurement. Who wants to get his or her
hands dirty with such arational and unscientific phenomena? Philosophy has
a long tradition of privileging reason over emotion—and of associating rea-
son with men, emotion with women. Immanuel Kant and his rationalist heirs
made reason the centerpiece of moral thought. Meanwhile, moral psychology
in the modern era was dominated by the theories of Jean Piaget (1932), Law-
rence Kohlberg (1974), and Elliott Turiel (1983), all of whom espoused the
view that human morality emerged from reason and conceptual development.
There was also a skepticism leveled against disgust, in particular. Disgust
was dismissed by many psychologists as not even rising to the level of a
proper emotion, whether implicitly (Russell 1980) or explicitly (Panksepp
2007). Disgust seemed more like a drive than an emotion—the counterpart
to appetite, perhaps only a notch above nausea, and therefore not of much
concern to the self-respecting psychologist. Never mind the importance of
basic drives in human affairs—uniquely human cognitive capacities have
been the overwhelming focus of social scientists. The rest, alas, are scraps left
to the ethologists. The irony in this perspective is that disgust appears to be a
uniquely human emotion (Kelly 2011; Rozin et al. 1993).
Sentimentalists in philosophy regard emotions as central to moral judg-
ment. Some even hold that moral truth is defined in terms of emotional
dispositions. Until quite recently, however, disgust never garnered any sus-
tained attention from sentimentalists. For example, Peter Strawson (1962)
inaugurated a broad research program on “reactive attitudes.” To hold a
person responsible is, in part, to experience reactive attitudes like guilt and
1
2 Nina Strohminger and Victor Kumar
resentment. But the second- and third-personal reactive attitudes discussed
were always varieties of moral anger (resentment, indignation, outrage) rather
than moral disgust (repugnance, revulsion).
What it would take for disgust to be brought into the fold was some outside-
the-box thinking. It is no accident that the modern renaissance of moral
disgust research was brought forth by scholars who are, individually and col-
lectively, interdisciplinary.
*
In the 1960s, a Harvard-trained psychologist named Paul Rozin began to
publish papers on food learning in animals.
These early papers took as their starting point the experimental findings of
John Garcia (Garcia, Ervin, and Koelling, 1966; Garcia and Koelling 1966),
which turned behaviorism on its head. According to behaviorist dogma, learn-
ing requires multiple trials to develop, and does not depend on which stimuli
are being paired together. Garcia found that rats learned to avoid sugar water
more readily when it was paired with nausea than when it was paired with a
flash of light, even when the nausea followed several hours after consuming
the flavored drink. What’s more, rats only needed a single instance to learn
to avoid the water. It appeared that rats had a prepared learning mechanism
for avoiding orally ingested toxins.
The Garcia effect, as it is known, suggests that food learning is not as
straightforward as it seems. This is especially true for generalists like humans
and rats, which must exploit available food sources while avoiding the dangers
lurking in unfamiliar comestibles (Rozin called this “the omnivore’s dilemma”;
1976). Rozin explored many of these adaptive learning problems, including
how children figure out what not to eat and how adults come to enjoy the sting
of chili pepper (Rozin 1990). Disgust presents itself as a clear tool to help this
learning process along—an advancement over mere distaste or nausea.
But disgust’s purview is not limited to food. Rozin’s great insight was
to propose that the disgust we feel about physical objects is fundamentally
related to the disgust at social objects. These different forms of disgust
emerged in hominids over evolutionary time—starting with oral disgust and
culminating in moral disgust (Haidt, McCauley, and Rozin 1994; Rozin,
Haidt, and McCauley 1993). This research program drew heavily on classic
accounts from cultural anthropology, notably the magical thinking docu-
mented by William Ian Frazer (1889) and Mary Douglas (1966).
In this way, the current interest in moral disgust, like so much else in
modern psychology, can be traced to a reactionary movement against
behaviorism.
*
Introduction 3
Disgust is now on the map in moral philosophy too, thanks largely to one
philosopher: Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum’s unusually broad interests
extend from ancient philosophy to contemporary legal and political theory.
In several books and articles, she offered the first sustained evaluation of
disgust’s suitability in moral life. As a moral philosopher and legal scholar,
Nussbaum located the emotion at the heart of deep moral and legal problems.
She saw, for example, that disgust is used to justify laws concerning obscen-
ity, prostitution, miscegenation, sodomy, homosexuality, necrophilia, stem
cell research, and human cloning.
Nussbaum suggested that disgust plays a larger role in moral and legal
practice than is generally recognized. However, she also argued disgust is a
force for ill and that we should seek to minimize its role. Unlike other emo-
tions, the content of disgust “is typically unreasonable, embodying magical
ideas of contamination, and impossible aspirations to purity, immortality,
and nonanimality, that are just not in line with human life as we know
it” (Nussbaum 2004: 14). Strikingly, Nussbaum’s case is almost entirely
empirically grounded. She draws on historical and sociological analysis of
disgust’s role in sustaining prejudice and inciting genocide. At the bottom
of Nussbaum’s case against disgust is a psychological theory about the
content and function of the emotion. On this view, disgust serves to protect
us from our animal nature. It is by understanding the function of disgust,
Nussbaum argues, that we begin to appreciate its pernicious influence in
moral practices.
*
What you will find in these pages is work from the direct intellectual descen-
dants of these scholars. Ideas, unlike children, usually have more than two
parents, but Rozin and Nussbaum are largely responsible for the perspectives
and debates that currently roil the field.
A foundational concern is taxonomic. How should we classify moral
disgust? This taxonomic question can be inward-looking—how many types
of moral disgust are there? It can also be outward-looking: how does moral
disgust differ from other moral emotions, such as anger and guilt? These
taxonomic inquiries can also turn existential. Is moral disgust even properly
considered a type of disgust? Though these questions have been traditionally
taken up by empirical scientists, they are essentially ones that call for con-
ceptual clarity and analysis: that is, borrowing from the methods of analytic
philosophy.
Disgust, perhaps more than any other emotion, tends to invite heated
debate over its evolutionary and social origins. And is moral disgust a direct
descendent of physical disgust, as Rozin originally suggested, or is the picture
more complicated than that?