Abstract
The philosophical debate over disgust and its role in moral discourse has focused on disgust’s epistemic status: can disgust justify judgments of moral wrongness? Or is it misplaced in the moral domain—irrelevant at best, positively distorting at worst? Correspondingly, empirical research into disgust has focused on its role as a cause or amplifier of moral judgment, seeking to establish how and when disgust either causes us to morally condemn actions, or strengthens our pre-existing tendencies to condemn certain actions. Both of these approaches to disgust are based on a set of assumptions that I call, in what follows, the evidential model of disgust. This paper proposes an alternative model, which I call the response model. Instead of looking at disgust as a cause and justification of judgments of moral wrongness, I will argue that disgust is better understood as a response to wrongness. More precisely, I argue that disgust is a response to norm violations, and that it is (sometimes) a fitting response insofar as norm violations are potentially contagious and therefore pose a threat to the stability and maintenance of norms.
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Notes
Fischer (2016) offers a variation of this type of view, on which disgust is not evidence per se of moral wrongness, but rather a heuristic alerting us to the fact that a norm has been violated. Insofar as Fischer maintains that disgust plays a justificatory role in moral judgment, his view is best understood as an evidential account.
As noted, however, Nussbaum is a disgust skeptic, so she is reporting this view, not endorsing it. I mention it here as an example of a case where disgust is taken to cause moral judgment.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing this out to me, and for drawing my attention to this point of Kelly’s.
An anonymous reviewer points out that disgust might itself be an evaluation, rather than a reaction to an evaluation. I don’t disagree; I use the term ‘reaction’ here to remain agnostic about the extent to which emotions contain evaluative content (and whether this content is propositional). While this question is an important one, and obviously relevant to the discussion at hand, my goal in this paper is to offer an account of the role disgust plays in our moral discourse and practice, and not to enter into debates over the correct theory of emotion.
I owe this point to an anonymous reviewer, who points out that disgust might play a justificatory role for others even if not the disgusted individual herself. I think this is an interesting observation, and it opens up the possibility that the literature on disgust’s epistemic role has focused excessively on first-person justification. I think this is a possibility worth taking seriously, and I hope that the discussion here of disgust’s function as a moral signal, rather than as a subjective state, will go some way to remedying this situation.
I thank an anonymous referee for bringing this point to my attention.
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Plakias, A. The response model of moral disgust. Synthese 195, 5453–5472 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1455-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1455-3