Ewwwwwwwww! The surprising moral force of disgust
What if our moral judgments are driven instead by more visceral human considerations? And what if one of those is not divine commandment or inductive reasoning, but simply whether a situation, in some small way, makes us feel like throwing up?This is the argument that some behavioral scientists have begun to make: that a significant slice of morality can be explained by our innate feelings of disgust. A growing number of provocative and clever studies appear to show that disgust has the power to shape our moral judgments.
Research has shown that people who are more easily disgusted by bugs are more likely to see gay marriage and abortion as wrong. Putting people in a foul-smelling room makes them stricter judges of a controversial film or of a person who doesn’t return a lost wallet. Washing their hands makes people feel less guilty about their own moral transgressions, and hypnotically priming them to feel disgust reliably induces them to see wrongdoing in utterly innocuous stories.
Today, psychologists and philosophers are piecing these findings together into a theory of disgust’s moral role and the evolutionary forces that determined it: Just as our teeth and tongue first evolved to process food, then were enlisted for complex communication, disgust first arose as an emotional response to ensure that our ancestors steered clear of rancid meat and contagion. But over time, that response was co-opted by the social brain to help police the boundaries of acceptable behavior.i love it when science proves my moral presuppositions.
The claims of moral psychologists, however, are undermined by an excellent paper by G.A. Cohen called “Facts and Principles.” He quite convincingly argues in the paper that the only way the status of normative claims can be affected by empirical data is if there is another normative principle that holds they are relevant. This very much limits the scope of the meta-ethical conclusions we can draw about morality from these kinds of experiments.
There is obviously little doubt, of course, that the moral claims that people make can be and are causally affected by other non-relevant factors. However, that has no bearing on the truth of those claims. Morality consists in further facts about states of affairs that give us reasons to do or not to do certain things. Mere disgust is not the kind of decisive reason that can override the truth of moral claims. It seems clear from this article that disgust can quite often get in the way of effective moral evaluation, but that does not entail that morality is reducible to disgust or emotion. This is a problem for applied ethics, not normative ethics or meta-ethics.
This blog has been retired.
