Ethics

DISGUST AND MORALITY

Empathy and sympathy have long been seen as the quintessential moral emotions. It seems intuitive that if any emotions are other-directed or altruistic, they are. Empathy and sympathy fit particularly well with the Western focus on morality as mainly concerned with harms, rights, and justice. For this reason, philosophers and psychologists interested in morality have long been excited about them. Only more recently have other emotions received comparable attention. Disgust is one of those emotions. As with so many other moral emotions, the trouble with disgust is that it has aspects that appear to be distinctly nonmoral. For instance, whereas it is possible to see how feeling distressed that someone else is distressed provides some grounds for thinking that what happened to them was wrong, or some grounds for helping them, it is not easy to see how feeling disgusted by someone grounds our rejecting their actions as immoral and our shunning their company. Disgust has the added inconvenience of being associated with racism and genocidal propaganda (the Jew as a rat, the Tutsi as a cockroach).

In the history of Western morality, however, purity has long played a not insignificant role, and it is not too difficult to connect purity with disgust. For instance, for the Ancient Greek, a murderer was unclean. The Bible, too, brims over with references to unclean acts. Until relatively recently, it used to be common to see such concepts discarded as irrelevant to morality given its poor fit with Western sensibilities and dominant Western moral theory. But renewed interest in morality as an empirical phenomenon has helped move research towards a more inclusive notion of what counts as moral phenomena. For instance, Richard Shweder was inspired by his work in Orissa, India, to reintroduced concepts of divinity, authority, and purity into empirical moral discourse. Jonathan Haidt, following in Shweder?s footsteps, has subsequently helped broaden our understanding of the varieties of moral categories.

For Haidt, disgust is an emotion that is typically felt in response to a violation of purity, sanctity, or divinity. Thus, an emotion, which evolved to protect the organism against poisoning through ingestion of food or to dangerous micro-organisms through touch or proximity, has become adapted to another moral domain (probably via the process of cultural evolution). Most obviously, disgust is associated with food restrictions. And food that can be eaten is often called right or lawful (food), as in kosher and halal. Notoriously, Christians will eat practically anything, and this mere fact might have contribute to the rather limited conception of the moral realm that is common in the West, or, perhaps, Western moral theory.

On closer inspection, however, it turns out that disgust is alive and well as a morally relevant emotion, even in the West. The famous scene of Lady Macbeth wanting to wash the blood of her hands is hardly foreign to the Western mind. Indeed, Zhong and Liljenquist have found that people exposed to stories of immoral deeds have an increased need for cleaning products, presumably in order to clean themselves. So disgust remains important to Western morality also, only it turns out that disgust plays a larger role in morality in lower socioeconomic groups than in higher socioeconomic groups. Since most academics and, therefore, moral theorists are from the latter group, disgust has tended to be overlooked as a morally relevant emotion. In a range of studies, Haidt and colleagues have demonstrated that many people find disgusting actions as wrong as harmful actions?e.g. having sex with a dead chicken. In a trend that some might find disturbing, people of higher SES find such actions relatively morally insignificant.

The burgeoning literature on shame has, however, tended to focus on shame as belonging to a particular moral domain. According to Shweder this domain is the domain of divinity, according to Haidt it is purity/sanctity, and according to Jesse Prinz it is that of natural order. What tend to be focused on here is the eliciting conditions of disgust which, albeit often of wildly diverse kinds, are seen to cluster around such conceptions.

Recent evidence from experiments on the relationship between disgust and moral judgments, however, suggest that disgust cannot be contained within a moral domain defined in terms of Divinity (purity/sanctity) or the Natural Order. In a recent issue of Science, Hanah Chapman and colleagues present evidence to the effect that people are disgusted not just at certain foul tasting foods, but to moral transgressions such as unfairness! Participants in the so-called Ultimatum Game not only expressed more disgust facially (separate measures were conducted), but also rated their emotion as being most like disgust (when given a forced choice between 7 different facial expressions when they were given unfair/unequal offers (anything less than 50/50), an effect that increased with increased unfairness. The study indicates that disgust can be associated with judgments that have nothing to do with divinity, purity, sanctity, or the natural order of things.

In an accompaniment to the article, Rozin, Haidt, and colleagues warn against accepting this study too uncritically given the close facial similarities between the emotions of disgust and anger. I find the criticism less than convincing. It is important to note, however, that Haidt himself has recently published a series of studies that show similar results, i.e. that disgust can be associated with a much broader range of moral judgment than the moral domain theoretic approach would have it (Schnall et al. 2008). Schnall et al. find that inducing disgust makes all moral judgments more severe whether or not those judgments concern independently judged disgusting actions.

Someone like Haidt has traditionally linked harm norms with emotions like compassion, empathy and/or sympathy. However, if one considers the evidence carefully, it is compelling to include many other sentiments as related to judgments of harm, including disgust. What is the preponderant emotion of Luke Skywalker as he rejects the Emperor?s suggestion that he strike him down right there and then if disgusted? The vehement rejection of the idea that he would ever become like the Emperor bears all the marks of a disgusted repulsion. Perhaps the time has come to move beyond moral domain theory.

(References: Chapman et al.: In Bad Taste: Evidence for the Oral Origins of Moral Disgust, Science, 323, 1222-6. Rozin et al.: From Oral to Moral. Science, 323, 1179-80. Schnall et al.: Disgust as Embodied Moral Judgment, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 1096-1109.)