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Tag: "disgust"

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The sacred places of people who are not religious
By Erich Vieth on February 14th, 2009

The sacred places of people who are not religious

I’ve been reading more of Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, including Chapter 9, titled “Divinity with or without God.”

Haidt’s travels through India led him to conclude that divinity and disgust were located on the same axis. As evidence of this, consider that throughout the world, cultures hold that divinity and disgust must be kept separate at all times. The relevant practices include “food, body products, animal’s, sex, death, body envelope violations and hygiene.” Haidt found that people recruit disgust “to support so many of the norms, rituals and beliefs that cultures use to define themselves.” (Page 186).

To know that which is sacred, identify that which elicits disgust and travel the opposite direction:

If the human body is a temple that sometimes gets dirty, it makes sense that “cleanliness is next to godliness.” If you don’t perceive this third dimension, then it is not clear why God would care about the amount of dirt on your skin or in your home. But if you do live in a three-dimensional world, then disgust is like Jacob’s Ladder: it is rooted in the earth, and our biological necessities, but it leads or guides people toward heaven–or, at least, toward something felt to be, somehow “up.”

Featured • Meaning of Life • Psychology Cognition • Religion • nature
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The incessant allure of Republican morality and what Democrats can do about it.
By Erich Vieth on September 10th, 2008

The incessant allure of Republican morality and what Democrats can do about it.

For the past few years, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt has successfully injected a huge does of psychology into the study of morality. Along the way, he has gone a long way toward bridging the “is” with the “ought,” a chasm that many philosophers have insisted to be unbridgeable.  Haidt explores these moral-psychological issues in highly [...]

American Culture • Consumerism • Good and Evil • Meaning of Life • Politics • Psychology Cognition • Science • ignorance • law and order
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By Erich Vieth on September 09th, 2008

That connection between disgust and morality - John McCain clearly crosses the line

I’ve written previously about that penchant of many conservatives to base their moral sense on visceral disgust.  As psychologist Jonathan Haidt has demonstrated, this connection is much more readily made by conservatives than by progressives (also, see here).
It is in that context that I must confess that I felt that connection deeply today when I [...]

Corruption • Politics
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By Erich Vieth on July 17th, 2008

Ordinary disgust taints moral judgments

I’ve written before about the work of Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”). He is a psychologist who has taken an experimental approach to investigating morality. I was highly impressed by Haidt’s analysis of conservative versus liberal versus of morality, for instance. In his previous work, Haidt determined that disgust played a significant role [...]

Good and Evil • Psychology Cognition
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By Erich Vieth on July 07th, 2007

Why conservatives and liberals talk past each other on moral issues.

I’ve studied moral philosophy for many years, mostly in frustration.  Though many philosophical theories of morality have offered tantalizing glimmers, they ultimately fail to account for the “moral” decisions people make in the real world.  Traditional philosophical accounts of morality have appeared especially feeble in light of the ongoing and volatile American culture wars.  For [...]

Good and Evil • Meaning of Life • Politics • Psychology Cognition • Religion
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By Erich Vieth on July 04th, 2007

Disgust as a basis for morality

It is striking that so many conservatives spend so much energy condemning gays. They don’t just criticize gays; they condemn gays with intense passion. Nor does this process of moral judgment usually involve any sort of delicate weighing process. Too often it is a visceral and unrelenting moral harpooning delivered by the likes of Ted Haggard—or, at least, the sort of judgment previously delivered by the then-closeted version of Ted Haggard, whose name is now synonymous with “reaction formation.”

Many of the people who condemn gays on street corners and pulpits remind me of steam boilers on the verge of blowing up. Anti-gay bigots are rarely if ever attempting to work through the details of any of the three main historical philosophical approaches to morality (consequentialism, deontology or virtue) when they condemn gays. No, there is nothing much philosophical about the way most people rail against the gays. They are not driven by any sort of philosophy. In my experience, they are primarily driven by disgust.

What especially disturbs conservative Christians are images of men kissing men and men having sex with other men. Such images are so incredibly disgusting to those who hate gays that it has become a favorite insult on the streets and in the military to shout “You’re GAY!” And when this insult is hurled in the process of casting moral judgment, it is done by people whose faces are contorted with utter disgust.

Because such condemnations of gays are so visceral, this raises the issue of whether disgust is a valid basis for morality . . .

Bigotry • Civil Rights • Culture • Good and Evil • Meaning of Life • Politics • Psychology Cognition • Religion • Science • The Middle East
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