Is Disgust Morally Significant?

When I catch whiff of a mound of spoiled rot, I feel disgust––“a visceral, unpleasant emotion” (Kumar 2017: 1). There is an evolutionary advantage to feeling this disgust: I am compelled emotionally to abstain from going near things that could make me ill. My feelings of disgust protect me from disease. I might also, however, feel disgust when I see a bigot yelling at an immigrant for speaking broken English. In his “Foul Behavior,” Victor Kumar argues that the second instance of disgust stands to benefit people much like the first. Below, I detail Kumar’s positive defense of disgust’s role in morality. Then, I gesture to ways Kumar could improve his account of disgust’s fittingness.

Kumar claims that disgust is an appropriate response to people who “exploit benign social interactions where there is an expectation of trust and reciprocity,” such as liars and cheats. This is because these sorts of “reciprocity violations” have the potential to spoil social interactions as well as encourage others to engage in these sorts of undesirable behaviors (Kumar 2017: 10). Just as non-moral disgust protects us from contamination and circulating disease by effecting us to avoid, exclude, and withdraw from a potential source of contagion, so too does moral disgust protect us from widespread pollution in important social exchanges by compelling us to avoid, exclude, and withdraw from reciprocity violators.

While Kumar convincingly argues that disgust “plays laudable roles in morality,” he does not offer a complete account of disgust and its fittingness (2017: 1). Even if Kumar does not need to offer any such account, it is worthwhile to scrutinize the relationship between feelings of moral disgust and violations of moral norms to lay the groundwork for what such an account would look like. Kumar claims that disgust is appropriately felt in the context of reciprocity violations, but it is important to note that there are many non-reciprocity violations which inspire disgust in others. Moreover, it seems like feeling disgust in these scenarios is appropriate. Consider the following example:

Bed Tundy: Bed Tundy is an ex-convict who was released from prison on parole after serving a full prison sentence. He was convicted of rape and murder. Upon his release from prison, he moved into a neighborhood with lots of young girls and women in it. Disgust motivates almost every family in the neighborhood to relegate their childrens’ playtime to the indoors and to purchase state-of-the-art security systems, effectively ostracizing Bed from his community.

By Kumar’s own lights, Bed did not, by raping and murdering an innocent woman, commit a reciprocity violation. Indeed, Kumar distinguishes “harm and violations of special obligations” (the action Bed engaged in) from reciprocity violations (Kumar 2017: 10). Still, it seems appropriate for people in Bed’s neighborhood to be disgusted by Bed even if he did not exploit benign social interactions with them. This is because Bed is perceived as a source of potential social contagion; his neighbors have reason to believe that he might seriously harm the women and girls living in his neighborhood, and therefore reason to withdraw from him.

 One might argue that instead of disgust, Bed’s neighbors feel some other emotion that motivates their ostracism of him. It isn’t obvious what this alternative emotion would be, though. Anger, for example, doesn’t seem relevant here since the action tendency for anger is confrontation. Moreover, Bed’s neighbors cannot properly confront him for his bad behavior because he has already been confronted and did his time. The neighbors can, however, justifiably feel disgust and the subsequent desire to withdraw from him to protect their women and girls. Thus, Kumar’s view about reciprocity violations and disgust seems to fail to capture all instances of justifiable disgust. Even though Kumar himself does not set out to capture all instances of justifiable disgust in this paper, it is worth considering what a complete account of the fittingness of disgust requires.

 So, on the one hand, a possible problem with Kumar’s view is that it fails to account for all instances of justifiable disgust. On the other hand, Kumar’s view is silent on the conditions under which it is appropriate to act out of disgust, which appear important to articulate. On page 10 of “Foul Behavior,” Kumar implores us to:

 “Imagine you discover someone in your social circle is a hypocrite. He has been urging you not to do something, but has been doing that same thing behind your back. Often, an appropriate response is to sever the interpersonal relationship by creating physical and social distance.”

 Even if likelihood and appropriateness often coincide, there is a difference between an emotional response being likely and appropriate. For example, you might find out that your best friend has made out with your brother. It may be likely that your response is volatile, but such a response is not appropriate. Surely, you would feel some level of betrayal, especially if you specified beforehand to either your friend or brother that this very scenario would bother you. And you would feel some level of disgust. But it is not obvious that you would necessarily be justified in ceasing to communicate with either person ever again because of how they made you feel. Similarly, I do not think you would necessarily be justified in ceasing to communicate with someone in your social circle because you discover they are a hypocrite.

 Kumar could respond by pointing to a difference between my case and his: Mine involves people who are closely related to you, whereas his involves someone “in your social circle.” If someone is somehow distantly implicated in your social world, then it might be appropriate to sever your relationship with them because it is costly to sustain a connection you have no reason to trust and some reasons to believe will be exploitative. I am disinclined to think this way, though. Consider what your social world would look like if somebody ceased communication with you every time you lied, cheated, or acted hypocritically without doing so maliciously or at another’s expense. It would be unlikely that you would have many intimate relationships with others. This, I think, points to a need for an articulated set of conditions that would constrain the extent to which we could justifiably act out of disgust when responding to reciprocity violations. Seeing as how Kumar neglects to spell out any such conditions, his view would benefit from doing so even if, strictly speaking, it is not necessary for him to do so. 

Victor Kumar impressively argues that “disgust is implicated in important moral norms and values that are shared by liberals and conservatives” (2017: 13). The important moral norms––namely, norms dealing with reciprocity––he points to, however, do not seem to offer a complete explanation of the role that disgust plays in morality. There are some norm violations unrelated to reciprocity in which felt disgust is appropriate, and there are some norm violations related to reciprocity in which disgust-motivated responses are inappropriate, as evidenced by my exposition above. Acknowledging this, I hope, will allow for the development of a complete account of disgust’s fittingness.