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The Good and the Gross

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Abstract

Recent empirical studies have established that disgust plays a role in moral judgment. The normative significance of this discovery remains an object of philosophical contention, however; ‘disgust skeptics’ such as Martha Nussbaum have argued that disgust is a distorting influence on moral judgment and has no legitimate role to play in assessments of moral wrongness. I argue, pace Nussbaum, that disgust’s role in the moral domain parallels its role in the physical domain. Just as physical disgust tracks physical contamination and pollution, so moral disgust tracks social contamination. I begin by examining the arguments for skepticism about disgust and show that these arguments threaten to overgeneralize and lead to a widespread skepticism about the justifiability of our moral judgments. I then look at the positive arguments for according disgust a role in moral judgment, and suggest that disgust tracks invisible social contagions in much the same way as it tracks invisible physical contagions, thereby serving as a defense against the threat of socio-moral contamination.

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Notes

  1. I borrow this term from Kelly (2011: 139).

  2. Knapp uses the term “evaluative,” and I follow him throughout my discussion of his argument. While I have, throughout the paper, put the point in terms of moral rather than evaluative judgments, moral judgments are, presumably, a subset or type of evaluative judgment; therefore, if disgust cannot support any evaluative judgment or discourse, it cannot support moral judgment or discourse. So my adoption of Knapp’s terminology here is motivated solely by the desire to paraphrase his argument using his preferred terminology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Northern Institute of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen, 435 S State St, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    Alexandra Plakias

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  1. Alexandra Plakias
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Correspondence to Alexandra Plakias.

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I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions. In addition, many thanks are owed to Dan Kelly, Shen-yi Liao, David Pizarro, Nina Strohminger, and audiences at Northwestern University and the Northern Institute of Philosophy for their feedback.

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Plakias, A. The Good and the Gross. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 16, 261–278 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-012-9334-y

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