It is striking that so many conservatives spend so much energy condemning gays.\u00a0 They don’t just criticize gays; they condemn gays with intense passion.\u00a0 Nor does this process of moral judgment usually involve any sort of delicate weighing process.\u00a0 Too often it is a visceral and unrelenting moral harpooning delivered by the likes of Ted Haggard\u2014or, at least, the sort of judgment previously delivered by the then-closeted version of Ted Haggard, whose name is now synonymous with \u201creaction formation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many of the people who condemn gays on street corners and pulpits remind me of steam boilers on the verge of blowing up.\u00a0 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<\/a>) when they condemn gays.\u00a0 No, there is nothing much philosophical about the way most people rail against the gays.\u00a0 They are not driven by any sort of philosophy.\u00a0 In my experience, they are primarily driven by disgust.<\/p>\n What especially disturbs conservative Christians are images of men kissing men and men having sex with other men.\u00a0\u00a0 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!”\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Because such condemnations of gays are so visceral, this raises the issue of whether disgust is a valid basis for morality.\u00a0<\/p>\n My \u201cgut reaction\u201d has been that disgust is a senseless, arbitrary and unworkable basis for a moral system.\u00a0 There are many reasons. If disgust is a proper foundation for morality, who gets to decide what is disgusting? The conservative Christians of the United States would certainly step up to claim that right and responsibility.\u00a0 After all, they claim that the U.S. is a “Christian Nation” and that they are especially inspired and guided by the Creator of the Universe.\u00a0 They are also quite sure that gay sex is immoral. They never seem to tire of making that public pronouncement.\u00a0 And why stop at homosexuality? Disgust could also serve as the basis for many other \u201cmoral\u201d positions.\u00a0 Therefore, whoever becomes the arbiter of morality-based-on-disgust would also attempt to educate the rest of us as to the evils of nude beaches, public breast-feeding, body piercing, abortion and euthanasia.<\/p>\n All of us should be wary about accepting disgust as a basis for morality, however.\u00a0 Demographics are shifting and, someday, conservative Christians might be on the receiving end of moral judgment based upon disgust.\u00a0 How so?\u00a0 According to the dictates of other<\/em> cultures American Christians do all kinds of disgusting things.\u00a0 They should clean up their own act.\u00a0 Christians do disgusting things like eating pork and wearing leather. Christian women expose their faces and their legs, they talk with men to whom they are not married and sometimes they kiss men in public.\u00a0 Christian women are sometimes so bold as to appear in public while they are menstruating.\u00a0 Christians often use their left hands and they commonly wear shoes inside<\/em> of their homes.\u00a0 Their homes are filthy because they often live with dogs and cats-some of them sleep<\/em> with their pet animals.\u00a0 They drink shameful substances such as alcohol and milk.\u00a0 These sorts of “disgusting” things could justify lengthy prison sentences in many cultures.\u00a0 Shame on Christians!<\/p>\n Whoever we choose our arbiter of disgust, then next step is obvious.\u00a0 Disgust is a favorite excuse for persecuting members of out-groups.\u00a0 Disgust is thus the unspoken foundation for bigotry.\u00a0 European Americans have historically characterized people from Africa and China<\/a> as \u201cdirty\u201d as the basis for depriving them of basic legal rights and human decencies.\u00a0 The same thing now goes for gays, who conservative Christians commonly characterize as animalistic and unhygienic. How often have you heard this comment: \u201cWhat\u2019s next, bestiality?\u201d<\/p>\n At this site, I have often argued that “disgusting” things tend to be those things that remind us that humans are animals<\/a>.\u00a0 According to many conservative Christians, though, we are not in the same league as animals, as evidenced by our invisible “souls.”<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n We are higher<\/em> than animals, evidenced by the Chain of Being.<\/a>\u00a0 This fits in nicely with the up\/down metaphor described by Mark Johnson and George Lakoff.<\/a>\u00a0 In Metaphors We Live By,<\/em><\/a> Johnson and Lakoff explain that “virtue, goodness and status” are all seen as “up.”\u00a0 In Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics<\/em><\/a> (1993), Mark Johnson explores various metaphors for moral character (page 50).\u00a0 One of the primary metaphors used for moral character is purity\/pollution.<\/p>\n The “moral,” rational self is high, while the “lower” self is associated with the body and bodily functions.\u00a0 This up\/down, high\/low orientation comes to be correlated with purity versus impurity.\u00a0 The body, with its passions and desires, ties us to that which is dirty, polluted and computer.\u00a0 The mind, as the seat of reason and will, tries to maintain its purity of rising above and trying to control the body.<\/p>\n Examples:<\/p>\n The animal connection is a slippery slope, of course, because humans are<\/em> animals, which opens up a potential cornucopia of bigotry for anyone with an imagination. The recipe is straightforward: anybody you dislike is animalistic or subhuman, justifying all kinds of mistreatment and bigotry.\u00a0 Many of the people who are struggling socially or economically (think of the homeless) engage in behavior many people would consider disgusting, as evidenced by comments made by police officers and social workers who sometimes enter the homes of such people.\u00a0 If not carefully constrained, this sense of disgust could be used to further ostracize these millions of people.<\/p>\n I’m suspicious of disgust as a basis for morality because many things that are ostensibly disgusting are good and necessary.\u00a0 As a teenager, I vividly remember reading The Agony and the Ecstasy<\/em>, the story of Michelangelo.\u00a0 Especially intriguing were Michelangelo’s surreptitious journeys to graveyards where he dissected corpses in order to become a better artist.\u00a0 The same thing goes for doctors, who must dissect cadavers in anatomy courses, engaging in behavior that many people consider disgusting in order to become proficient doctors.\u00a0<\/p>\n At bottom, however, my main concern is that disgust is such a primal reaction.\u00a0 It seems too simplistic to rely on disgust as a moral yardstick.\u00a0 Why rely upon a primitive unthinking reaction, when other, much more sophisticated and self-correcting yardsticks are available?\u00a0 Why rely on disgust when we could be focusing on consequentialism, deontology or virtue<\/a>).\u00a0 Next to the Golden Rule (or any other formulation regarding reciprocity), disgust seems especially trite and coarse.\u00a0 Disgust would be the sort of basis on which a toddler<\/em> would be expected to make moral judgments, not adults.\u00a0 Adults should not be judging and enforcing conduct of other adults on the basis that something is “icky.”<\/p>\n I have been thinking about disgust as a basis for morality in reaction ever since reading some especially thoughtful articles\u00a0by Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia.\u00a0 Haidt spends considerable time on this topic of disgust in his 2006 book, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth and Ancient Wisdom.<\/em><\/a>\u00a0 The starting point for much of Haidt\u2019s work is that liberals and conservatives keep talking past each other on moral issues:<\/p>\n On issue after issue, liberals want to maximize autonomy by removing limits, barriers, and restrictions.\u00a0 The religious right, on the other hand, wants to structure personal, social and political relationships in three dimensions and so create a landscape of purity and pollution where restrictions maintain the separation of the sacred and the profane.\u00a0 For the religious right, Hell on Earth is a flatland of unlimited freedom where selves roam around with no higher purpose than expressing and developing themselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Page 210).\u00a0 Liberal politics gives wide deference to the self, to the right of individuals to choose their own destiny, to pursue happiness as they see fit.\u00a0 It is an ownership society based on the assumption that the citizens own their own lives.\u00a0 For conservatives, it\u2019s not that simple and I disagree with them.\u00a0 That other people might see my life as “disgusting” is of no legal import. Nor should it have moral consequences that others see my life-choices as disgusting.<\/p>\n Or should it?<\/p>\n Disgust is not actually something we can understand in isolation.\u00a0 Disgusting things are found toward one end of a long scale.\u00a0 On the other end of that same scale we find things that give us the feeling of beauty or awe.\u00a0 This suggests to me that there is overlap between aesthetics and morality.\u00a0 To some extent, that which is morally proper is infused with beauty and those things that are morally repugnant are infested with ugliness.\u00a0<\/p>\n Jonathan Haidt writes persuasively that each of us understands and runs our lives based on both endpoints of this scale, whether or not we proclaim any belief in any supernatural being.<\/p>\n In The Sacred and the Profane, [Mircea] Eliade shows that the perception of sacredness is a human universal.\u00a0 Regardless of their differences, all religions have places (temples, shrines, holy trees), times (holy days, sunrise, solstices), and activities (prayer, special dancing) that allow for contact or communication with something otherworldly and pure.\u00a0 To mark off sacredness, all other times, places and activities are defined as profane (ordinary, not sacred).\u00a0 The borders between the sacred and the profane must be carefully guarded, and that’s what rules of purity and pollution are all about. Eliade says that the modern West is the first culture in human history that has managed to strip time and space of all sacredness and to produce a fully practical, efficient, and profane world.\u00a0 This is the world that religious fundamentalists find unbearable and are sometimes willing to use force to fight against.<\/p>\n Eliade’s most compelling point, for me, is that sacredness is so irrepressible that it intrudes repeatedly into the modern profane world in the form of “crypto religious” behavior. Eliade noted that even a person committed to a profane existence has<\/p>\n privileged places, qualitatively different from all others–a man’s birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth.\u00a0 Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the “holy places” of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n When I read this, I gasped.\u00a0 Eliade had perfectly pegged my feeble spirituality, limited as it is, to places, books, people and events that have given me moments of uplift and enlightenment.\u00a0 Even atheists have intimations of sacredness, particularly when in love or in nature.\u00a0 We just don’t infer that God caused those feelings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n These passages got me thinking too.\u00a0 There are certain places and things that I hold sacred, albeit in a provisional and private sense.\u00a0 I don’t expect anyone else to agree with me as to what I find sacred.\u00a0 I certainly would not try to compel anyone to agree with me as to what is sacred.\u00a0 But, to me, some things seem sacred (in a secular sense).\u00a0 Here are some examples from my life: Darwin’s tomb<\/a>, redwood trees, my children, the first house I remember living in, a wristwatch my grandfather gave me when I was eight.\u00a0 I recognize these objects and places as special, even . . . holy (though, again, not holy in any supernatural sense).\u00a0<\/p>\n Now that I’ve admitted that I recognize the awe-inspiring and privately-holy side of the scale, I also see that I make use of the other side of the scale too: those things that are disgusting.\u00a0 Certain things are just \u201cover the line\u201d for me.\u00a0 It disgusts me to see people ruining their own bodies by eating, drinking or smoking themselves to death.\u00a0 It disgusts me to see people abusing their children.\u00a0 I’m disgusted by intolerance and bigotry.\u00a0 I’m disgusted when I see people filling the young children’s minds with superstition, fear and intolerance. I would be disgusted if I saw people having sexual intercourse in inappropriate places such as in the middle of a shopping mall or in front of a grade school.\u00a0 Many things about Las Vegas (as a tourist attraction)\u00a0are repulsive to me, my problem centering on\u00a0the amorality and wasteful extravagance. \u00a0It’s not that each of these things is equally disgusting, but I am repulsed and disgusted by these sorts of things (this is not an exhaustive list).\u00a0<\/p>\n My self-analysis regarding awe-inspiring and disgusting things convinced me to moderate my position on the role of disgust on moral issues.\u00a0 After doing some soul-searching in preparing to write this post, I came to the conclusion that disgust does play a role in my own moral judgment.\u00a0 To what extent<\/em> does disgust play a role in my own moral thinking?\u00a0 I’m not sure that I can parse out the effects of disgust, though I know it is there.\u00a0 For instance, it is impossible for me to rule out that disgust is a factor in my view that murder and child abuse are immoral.\u00a0 I am sure that I am viscerally repulsed by such conduct.\u00a0 Perhaps it is my disgust that gives me the confidence\u00a0to hold other people to my<\/u> moral standard regarding such things as murder or child abuse.<\/p>\n Disgust comes in several flavors and likely plays a role in everyone\u2019s\u00a0 moral thinking.\u00a0 To explore your own sensitivity to disgust, I invite you to visit Haidt’s psychology website<\/a> and taking his Disgust Scale survey (it takes about 10 minutes).<\/p>\n Others have recently commented on the connection between disgust and moral judgment.\u00a0 In an article called “The Depths of Disgust,” in the June 14, 2007 edition of Nature<\/em><\/a> (available only to subscribers online), Dan Jones asks whether there is “wisdom to be found in repugnance” or whether disgust offers “nothing but support to prejudice.”\u00a0 His conclusion is that disgust is a deep-seated emotion that is inextricably entangled with morality, though it is too often a poor guide to ethical action.<\/p>\n Jones points out that disgust has adaptive value that was\u00a0honed by evolution.\u00a0 Its function “seems to be to prevent people from eating contaminated foodstuffs and to get rid of any they have ingested.\u00a0 Disgust is related to bodily purity and integrity, with things that should be on the outside-such as feces-out, and things that should be on the inside-such as blood-kept in.”\u00a0<\/p>\n What is the connection between visceral disgust and social disgust?\u00a0 We should first define a term.\u00a0 Haidt’s website<\/a> defines “core disgust” as<\/p>\n the “core” of the emotion, which is about defending the mouth from contamination by dirty or inappropriate things like body excretions, certain animals like rats and cockroaches, and certain foods, like ice cream with ketchup.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In the Nature<\/em> article, Dan Jones writes that experiments have shown that “core disgust” and socio-moral versions of disgust<\/p>\n recruit overlapping brain areas, particularly the lateral and medial orbitofrontal cortex, suggesting that the emotions are related.\u00a0 These regions of the brain are activated by an unpleasant sensory stimuli, and they connect with other emotion-related areas, such as the amygdala.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n When experimental subjects were asked whether they would wear “Hitler’s carefully laundered sweater” and they refused to do so, they were relying upon some of the same brain areas that repel us from eating rotting food, for instance.\u00a0<\/p>\n Haidt thinks he has found clues pointing to a physiological reality for moral disgust.\u00a0 Whereas anger pushes the heart rate up, feeling visceral disgust makes it drop.\u00a0 With his student Cary Sherman, Haidt showed people hooked up to a heart monitor video footage of morally negative but not viscerally disgusting behavior, such as an American neo-Nazi meeting.\u00a0 The participants said that the video triggered disgust and anger, and on average their heart rates fell, not rose.\u00a0 What’s more, those who reported increased clenching in their throat had a greater drop in heart rate, making the link with core disgust look stronger.\u00a0 “We think that this is the first physiological evidence that socio-moral disgust really is disgust and not just metaphor or anger, says Haidt of the as yet unpublished work.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Nature article presents evidence that this visceral disgust can affect ethical judgments. When viewing pictures of drug addicts or homeless people, the amygdala and the insula fired up (indicating fear and disgust, respectively) but the prefrontal cortex (which normally is active when considering people in social situations) was less active.\u00a0 This experiment indicates that disgust can trump empathy and compassion.\u00a0 “When we respond to a homeless person with disgust, we avoid considering the person’s mind, says [psychologist Susan Fiske].\u00a0 “We treat the person as equivalent to a pile of garbage.”\u00a0 The Nature article also cites Marc Hauser, who holds that disgust is an emotion of distancing “of avoiding or expelling the contaminant.”\u00a0 Disgust is thus capable of fueling the expulsion of out-group members.\u00a0 Brazilian cognitive neuroscientist Jorge Moll explains that the system for making moral judgments was “cobbled together” from pre-existing brain systems.<\/p>\n The experimental data point to the possibility that our disgust system might have been adapted by evolution to allow us to reject or disapprove of abstract concepts such as ideologies and political views that are deeply influenced by culture, as well as social groups associated with “disgusting” concepts, says Moll.<\/p>\n The Nature article points out that disgust could thus facilitate cohesion within groups by defending against out-groups.<\/p>\n Disgust works for the group as it does for the individual-what is in the group is “me” and what is not is “not me,” says Haidt. “Where core disgust is the guardian of the body, moral disgust acts as the guardian of social body-that’s when disgust shows its ugliest side.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Fiske points to the experimental data to remind us to think twice before relying on disgust as the basis for moral judgment:<\/p>\n History seems to bear this out.\u00a0 Women (especially menstruating ones), the mentally and physically disabled, and interracial sex have all been viewed with disgust, and are still viewed as such by some.\u00a0 But few people in liberal societies today would defend such attitudes and many have genuinely ceased to feel them.\u00a0 If disgust wasn’t a good moral indicator then, why should it be now?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n