Abstract
In this paper, I defend a novel skeptical view about moral disgust. I argue that much recent discussion of moral disgust neglects an important ontological question: is there a distinctive psychological state of moral disgust that is differentiable from generic disgust, and from other psychological states? I investigate the ontological question and propose two conditions that any aspiring account of moral disgust must satisfy: (1) it must be a genuine form of disgust, and (2) it must be genuinely moral. Next, I examine two prominent accounts of moral disgust by John Kekes and Victor Kumar and argue that neither successfully establishes the existence of genuinely moral disgust: Kekes’ account does not satisfy condition (2), and Kumar’s view does not meet condition (1). I claim that an important general lesson can be drawn from my critiques of Kekes’ and Kumar’s accounts: to establish the existence of moral disgust, one must provide unequivocal evidence that genuinely moral disgust, not generic disgust or anger, is being elicited in response to relevant moral violations. I conclude by considering why we ought to be skeptical about the general prospect of giving a positive answer to the ontological question, given the available evidence.
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Notes
Giubilini (2016) has recently convincingly argued that this very conceptual confusion plagues discussions of moral disgust.
Plakias (2017) defends an account of moral disgust that provides a positive answer to the question about fittingness, where the emotional response in question is generic disgust. So, she does not take a stand on the ontological question, as I will be delineating it in this paper.
For notable exceptions see, e.g. Giner-Sorolla et al. (2018) and Russell and Giner-Sorolla (2013), which both address the importance – and difficulty – of distinguishing moral disgust both from other kinds of disgust, such as physical (generic, in my terms) disgust, and from other emotions, such as anger; Giubilini (2016), who questions whether moral disgust is a genuine form of disgust or some other kind of psychological state; Chapman et al. (2009), who argue that moral disgust just is the same psychological state as physical disgust, and Royzman and Kurzban (2011), who argue (contra Chapman et al., 2009) that the term ‘moral disgust’ is often used metaphorically and thus does not imply the existence of a special emotion kind.
What I’m calling generic disgust in this paper is also often referred to as ‘physical disgust,’ ‘bodily disgust,’ ‘pathogen disgust,’ or ‘core disgust.’
It should be noted that both Kelly and I are conceiving of the moral domain as both narrow and normative, as is common in the philosophical literature. I discuss this point further on p. 8.
The ‘typically’ qualifier used above does not rule out the possibility that a particular object (or property of that object) could elicit both forms of disgust (assuming that moral disgust does exist). I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
Strictly speaking, these properties won’t themselves be moral – rather, they will be non-moral properties on which moral properties supervene, such as harm, loss of property without consent, failure to cooperate, and so on. For the sake of expedience, in what follows I will refer to properties on which moral properties supervene just as moral.
I include this ‘by the lights of the agent’ stipulation to allow for the realistic possibility that agents could erroneously perceive some action as morally wrong – assuming that there is a fact of the matter about which actions are morally wrong – and respond to it as such with moral disgust. For example, imagine someone who experiences moral disgust in response to the prospect of two men having sex. Homosexual sex is not morally wrong, but it could nevertheless elicit genuine albeit unfitting moral disgust (assuming there is such a thing). My proposed condition is intentionally formulated to leave this possibility open. I discuss this specific case and its implications for my view further below.
Kumar (2017: 17) suggests something along these lines when he raises the possibility that someone who is morally disgusted by her own actions may be motivated to reform her behavior to ‘cleanse’ herself. I suggest that other self-cleansing behaviors could include confessing her sins or performing ritual ablutions (if she is religiously-minded), or engaging in restitution.
In what follows, I restrict my focus to approaches that seek to define morally wrong actions. There is another influential approach relevant to the broader question of defining morality – the tradition of virtue ethics – which focuses on character rather than on action. However, by virtue ethicists’ own lights, this tradition does not sit easily with deontic concepts like right/wrong action and instead works best with aretaic concepts defined in terms of virtue and vice, which are notably broader in scope than deontic notions. So, for the purposes of the current paper, I will mostly be setting this character-based approach aside. For a more extensive discussion of the link between disgust responses, bodily moral violations, and inferences about bad character, see Giner-Sorolla et al. (2018). I thank Roger Giner-Sorolla for raising this point.
An anonymous reviewer helpfully pointed out that defining conventional violations as authority-dependent is question-begging, as illustrated by the following example: perhaps the teacher, the relevant authority on chewing gum, says chewing gum is not permitted precisely because it is morally wrong (e.g. maybe it is upsetting, unpleasant to see/hear, or otherwise annoying to others, and it’s wrong to upset or annoy people when we could easily avoid doing so). I am very sympathetic to this point, and following Shoemaker (2011), note that it may stem from a problematic foundational assumption of the task itself: i.e. that there is a distinction between moral and conventional transgressions, and this distinction is based (partly) on the distinction between authority-independence and authority-dependence. Indeed, this gives rise to a related question-begging complaint: suppose one were a divine command theorist who thought that the wrongness (and rightness) of actions depended on God’s commands. Given the assumptions of the moral/conventional distinction task, removing God’s authority would render any violation of moral rules non-moral, which would in turn imply, implausibly, that the divine command theorist’s moral judgments were merely conventional. These are, admittedly, difficult issues, but for present purposes, as long as the reader grants that other candidate moral properties besides authority-independence plausibly help distinguish between moral vs. non-moral/conventional violations, my argument need not hang on settling them.
These harms are generally understood to be direct harms, but cf. Schein and Gray (2017), who offer an extensive review of cross-cultural variation with respect to moral values and perceptions of harm.
Here, given the considerations discussed in note 9, I am refraining from proposing a third feature of moral violations that could be drawn from the moral/conventional distinction literature: that the wrongness of moral violations is authority-independent.
Thanks to Roger Giner-Sorolla for pressing me on this point.
Indeed, one of the motivations for Kumar’s view, which I discuss in the next section, is a class of non-harm-based moral violations called reciprocity violations which, Kumar argues, elicit moral disgust. So, it is all the more important that we do not rule out the possibility of such a class.
I am happy to accept that the moral violations Kumar and Kekes are talking about in their accounts of moral disgust are genuinely moral violations. Kekes (1998: 107), for one, explicitly accepts that we should make a distinction between violations of moral norms – what he calls ‘required conventions’ – and non-moral conventions.
Giubilini (2016: 243) makes a similar point, arguing that Kekes’ account, and its reliance on the (putatively) morally disgusting cases discussed below, fails to provide us with a reason for thinking that the disgust that’s elicited by moral violations is elicited by morally relevant aspects of those violations. He asks, ‘[W]hat makes the presence of excrement morally relevant, such that the disgust it elicits is not only physical disgust that happens to accompany an independently immoral act like killing, but also moral disgust’ (235: emphasis in original). Giubilini goes on to develop his critique of Kekes by arguing that Kekes’ account is circular because it “fails to distinguish disgust as a consequent from disgust as a moralizing emotion’ (234) – in other words, he argues that Kekes fails to distinguish between fittingness and appropriateness as D’Arms & Jacobson (2000) counsel we must. Giner-Sorolla et al. (2018) also address the possibility that (putative) moral disgust only responds to physically disgusting elements of moral violations and note that much of the current literature does not adequately control for it.
Kumar’s view resembles Plakias’ account of moral disgust (2013, 2017) in some respects, though Kumar’s account is unique in its discussion of disgust’s polluting aspect as involving subversion of trust. Plakias argues that moral disgust tracks social contagion in much the same way that physical disgust tracks physical contagion.
In drawing attention to this distinction between fittingness and appropriateness (and developing the list of separable questions about moral disgust in the introduction), I am indebted to D’Arms and Jacobson (2000) for their original work on the distinction between fittingness vs. appropriateness of moral emotions, and to Giubilini (2016) for his application of the fittingness vs. appropriateness distinction specifically to other extant accounts of moral disgust.
Kumar notes that moral disgust is also elicited by in-group and purity violations, but he focuses primarily on moral disgust as a fitting response to reciprocity violations – reciprocity violations, unlike purity violations, are a purer kind of example, since they are not physically disgusting. I follow him in this regard.
The economic games Kumar discusses are the ultimatum game and the public goods game. The ultimatum game is a two-player game in which the first player is given a sum of money and instructed to offer some portion of it, however small, to the other player, who decides to either accept or reject the proposal. If they reject the proposal, neither player receives any money. In a public goods game, multiple players contribute money to a pot that is then multiplied and redistributed among all players. Though it is in everyone’s best interests, collectively, to contribute all their money to the common pot, players may still defect by choosing not to contribute their fair share to the pot and benefitting from others’ contributions to the pot when the money is redistributed.
We should consider this alternative explanation of the cases where defection has already spread throughout the group: people respond to growing defection by hoarding their money, too, not primarily because defection is itself polluting, but because they just want to salvage what they can of their own pot of money once it becomes clear that everyone else is defecting.
Kumar has a narrower reading of harm in mind, where harm means inflicting physical (as opposed to psychological, emotional, financial, etc.) injury on a victim. However, this narrow interpretation of harm is, arguably, picking out an artificial category. People’s interests are not so narrowly tied to physical injury; many would prefer to experience a small physical harm, like a paper cut, than a large emotional harm, such as being betrayed. And anger is a common response to emotional harm as well as physical harm.
An alternative explanation is that, when one is cheated, one experiences such treatment as a form of disrespect, without necessarily taking oneself to have been harmed. If this explanation is true, it does not weaken the force of my argument, since disrespect is just as likely to elicit anger (and not disgust) as a setback to one’s interests.
Kumar acknowledges that reciprocity violations in the context of economic games like the ultimatum game, and public goods games, sometimes elicit anger as well as disgust, though he does say anger is elicited to ‘a lesser degree’ than disgust (9). But, as I will argue below, this concession does not do justice to the evidence.
By contrast, the trigger terms ‘grossed out’ and ‘repulsed’ were much more likely to prompt descriptions of events or objects that are generically disgusting, such as bodily products, sexual acts, insects and rodents.
For the sake of argument, I want to consider the following possibility: What if some people really do experience reciprocity violations as morally disgusting? Kumar just needs to show that some people are in the grip of generic disgust in response to reciprocity violations in order to meet condition (1), which requires that a given emotional response be a genuine form of disgust for it to be an instance of genuinely moral disgust. After all, not everyone will necessarily have the same emotional response to the same elicitors. Let’s grant, then, that some people are in fact responding with genuine disgust to reciprocity violations, and examine how Kumar’s account fares with respect to condition (2), which requires that a given emotional response be genuinely moral for it to count as an instance of genuinely moral disgust. To successfully meet this second condition, Kumar must show that his moral disgust is appropriately tracking (what the agent takes to be) a genuinely moral property that helps explain in virtue of what reciprocity violations are wrong. Recall that what’s distinctive about reciprocity violations on Kumar’s account is that they are polluting and contaminating. I’ll address each of these features in turn. Kumar claims that reciprocity violations ‘pollute’ by subverting shared expectations of reciprocity and trust during social interactions. But, as I argued earlier, reciprocity violations may well overlap with harm violations and/or violations of special obligations in this very respect. If this is right, the polluting aspect is not unique to reciprocity violations and thus cannot explain why moral disgust as opposed to anger is best suited to respond to pollution. Leaving aside pollution, Kumar’s account seems to give a compelling explanation for why moral disgust is a uniquely appropriate response to contamination potency – its nature as a subspecies of generic disgust, which tracks non-moral contamination, makes it well-suited to track contamination in the moral domain. But why think that contamination potency is a morally relevant property? The mere propensity to spread is morally neutral: contagiousness is a property that both good and bad things can possess. In her account of descriptive moral disgust, which also identifies contamination potency as the key property that disgust responds to, Plakias claims that heavy drinking, a bad form of behavior, is socially contagious; people are 50% more likely to drink heavily if some of the people they are with do so (2013: 275). On the other hand, research also suggests that if people think other people are already performing some right action, they themselves are more likely to do it, too (Giubilini 2016: 238). If morally right actions can also possess the property of contamination potency, then it’s hard to see how morally wrong actions can be wrong in virtue of their being potentially contaminating. Plakias herself points out that whether some act really is immoral is a separate question from the question of whether it is contaminating (2013: 276).
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Acknowledgements
For helpful feedback on this paper, I am grateful to many people, including Sara Aronowitz, Sarah Buss, Justin D'Arms, Iskra Fileva, Joshua Gert, Dan Jacobson, Sydney Keough, Victor Kumar, Alice MacLachlan, William Melanson, Hichem Naar, Peter Railton, Nate Smith, Chandra Sripada, and two anonymous referees for this journal. Previous versions of the paper were presented to audiences at the University of Michigan, the 2018 Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress, the 2018 meeting of the Central division of the American Philosophical Association, the 2017 Biennial Conference for the International Society on Research in Emotion, and the 2017 Omaha Workshop in the Philosophy of Emotion. Many thanks to all these audiences for valuable discussion.
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Bollard, M. Is There Such a Thing as Genuinely Moral Disgust?. Rev.Phil.Psych. 13, 501–522 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00539-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00539-4