Reflection
My son recently caught a mouse, its furry little body stuck in the plastic jaws of a trap. I had the job of disposal. When I emptied the trap into the bin, I got the angle wrong and its furry little body slid onto my hand. I felt that skin-crawling feeling: disgust.
The physicality of disgust is important. Many of the things that arouse disgust seem to have a sound evolutionary basis: rotting food, infected wounds, bodily waste, household pests like cockroaches, insects, vermin - we tend to have a strong aversive reaction to these, and for good reason.
Moral disgust is a bit like this. We are disgusted by things that we see as a kind of corruption, a state of decrepitude that carries with it the threat of transmission, of cross-infection. We are often disgusted by (im)moral positions that threaten us or that we think threaten our social order.
I find these visceral responses to (im)moral actions intriguing. We feel it before we think it. We s…
