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Notes
Daniel Kelly, Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), p. 148.
Ibid., p. 151.
See Brian Besong, “The Prudent Conscience View,” International Philosophical Quarterly (Forthcoming).
Kelly, op. cit., p. 148.
The basing relation invoked here should be taken in a broad sort of way; thus, S needn’t see (or even be capable of introspectively discovering) that b is based on f for b to in fact be based on f.
Ibid., pp. 17–21.
See, for instance, Jorge Moll and others, “The Moral Affiliations of Disgust: A Functional MRI Study,” Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, Vol. 18, No. 1, (2005), 68–78; Paul Rozin, Laura Lowery and Rhonda Ebert, “Varieties of Disgust Faces and the Structure of Disgust,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 66, No. 5, (1994), 870–881.
See Kelly, op. cit., pp. 43–56.
See ibid., pp. 89–92.
See ibid., pp. 119–126, 132–135.
See ibid., p. 147.
Ibid., p. 147.
It is unclear whether Kelly thinks all or only some moral beliefs formed in response to feelings of disgust are irrational byproducts of the disgust eliciting system, see ibid., p. 134.
Ibid., p. 147.
See Paul Rozin, “Moralization,” in Allan M. Brandt and Paul Rozin, eds., Morality and Health (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 379–401; Paul Rozin, “The Process of Moralization,” Psychological Science, Vol. 10, No. 3, (1999), 218–221 <doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00139>. See also Kelly, op. cit., p. 151.
Ibid., p. 151.
See ibid., p. 47.
Ibid., pp. 151–152.
Ibid., p. 148.
The intuitive responses I’ve relied upon to motivate PCV can also be provided a justification at the level of ethical theory. For the disgust eliciting system (DES) seems designed to promote human flourishing, giving rise to adverse reactions toward those things that are inimical to human wellbeing, such as poisons and parasites, among others. Yet, as Philippa Foot (Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), chaps. 7–8.) has argued, there is a strong conceptual connection between acts that have a negative moral status and those actions that tend to be inimical to human flourishing and constitutive of human wellbeing. Hence, it seems entirely prudent for agents to pay attention and give at least some weight to the outputs of the disgust eliciting system, as the reactions provide some defeasible and indirect evidence that the action is morally wrong, since the fact that something triggered a DES response is a reason to believe it is inimical to human flourishing. After all, it is prima facie plausible to believe that DES provides evolutionary advantage because disgust reactions promote human flourishing, and ignoring these reactions across the board would be inimical to human flourishing. Any entanglement between disgust and morality will thus not be ad hoc and obviously unfitting at a theoretical level, if indeed acts that have negative moral status are acts that are inimical to our flourishing. Of course, Kelly will deny that a disgust response provides defeasible evidence for the moral status of an act, but if the foregoing analysis of his arguments is apt, then we have reason not to be so quick to reject this theoretic connection. More broadly, in his presentation of the natural law theory of ethics, Michael Cronin expands upon how the “moral feelings” can constitute a defeasible secondary (or derivative) criteria for judging the moral character of an action, The Science of Ethics, 3rd edn., 2 vols. (Dublin: M.H. Gill and Son, Ltd., 1930), Vol. 1, pp. 155–157. Although PCV is independent of natural law ethical theories, the two fit well together, and Cronin’s explanation provides a deeper theoretical rationale for why prudent agents may fittingly rely upon their feelings as providing partial justification for their moral beliefs.
Moral beliefs can be re-formed when an agent considers them and affirms them anew. Acts of reaffirming a moral belief, like this, alter the epistemic justification of a moral belief so that the belief’s epistemic justification is proportionate to the degree of prudence possessed by the agent at the time of the belief’s being reaffirmed. This does not mean, as indicated above, that one must reason rightly to every belief, but it does mean that every belief must be formed according to the norms of right reason (which allows for non-inferentially justified beliefs).
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. by Fathers of the English Dominican province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1920), sec. IIaIIae 47:2.
Aquinas, op. cit., sec. IaIIae 65:1, IIaIIae 47:14.
Robert Audi, “Intuition, Inference, and Rational Disagreement in Ethics,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Vol. 11, No. 5, (2008), 475–492 (pp. 447–448); Matthew Bedke, “Intuitional Epistemology in Ethics,” Philosophy Compass, Vol. 5, No. 12, (2010), 1069–1083; Michael Huemer, Ethical Intuitionism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 99; William E. Tolhurst, “Seemings,” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3, (1998), 293–302.
See John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (New York: Catholic Publication Society, 1870), chap. 5.1.
Although it is not the goal of this paper to develop a comprehensive psychological model for moral disgust, one might see moral disgust as being a ‘nonbasic’ emotion, comprised of ordinary disgust triggered by the cognitive state in which one recognizes the moral impermissibility of an act. If so, prudence serves to regulate, by a form of ‘calibration’, which cognitive states trigger a basic feeling of disgust, see discussion in Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni, The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 24–26. I thank a blind referee for this suggestion. One might think that certain emotional responses are not dependent upon the virtues, but the converse, namely, that the virtues are dependent upon the right emotional responses as, for example, supplying a necessary part of moral motivation; for instance, see Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 126–134. I do not think this is correct, but it is amenable to PCV insofar as proper affective responses and the virtues seem to develop in positive proportion to each other, according to this view.
See David Pugmire, Sound Sentiments: Integrity in the Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 63–64; Zagzebski, op. cit., p. 128.
For more detail regarding PCV, see again Besong, op. cit.
See Deonna and Teroni, op. cit., pp. 118–121.
By PCV, more prudent agents will be proportionately more justified in the belief that Ed’s actions were wrong, but given that the belief that Ed’s actions were wrong is in accord with the norms of prudence, the seeming that Ed’s actions were wrong because of the disgust they appropriately elicited will always confer at least some degree of epistemic justification onto beliefs formed in response to it.
For reasons alluded to here, although Pete begins to feel disgust at his pedophiliac desires in Pervert through social pressure, not all social pressure to feel disgust is bad nor purely conventional. Some social conventions—such as those against pedophiliac desires—can be firmly grounded on appropriate disgust reactions.
See Kelly, op. cit., pp. 21–26.
See Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth S. Vrba, “Exaptation-A Missing Term in the Science of Form,” Paleobiology, Vol. 8, No. 1, (1982), 4–15 (pp. 7–8).
See John Pollock, Contemporary Theories of Knowledge, First Edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986), pp. 37–39.
One might think that hesitancy here undermines my previous objection that Kelly’s argument proves too much, since it would imply that we should withhold judgment regarding all of our moral beliefs (akin to the way we’d act toward memorial beliefs if we discovered many had been falsely produced). However, the tension here is only apparent, for there are externalist accounts of epistemic justification available that explain the relevant cases of defeat other than process reliabilism, see Michael Bergmann, Justification without Awareness: A Defense of Epistemic Externalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), among others.
See Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan, “The Weirdest People in the World?,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 33, No. 2–3, (2010), 61–83 (p. 63).
The situation is different when one knows that one’s affective response r is very similar to the affective response of an agent one has justified reason to believe is prudent. In that case, one has a defeater for any potential defeater against the trustworthiness of r, particularly against those potential defeaters arising from one’s knowledge of one’s own moral defects. In that case, one can justifiably place greater trust in the fittingness of r than one should based upon one’s own virtuous character alone.
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I’d like to thank especially Dan Kelly for his feedback on this paper.
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Besong, B. Being Appropriately Disgusted. J Value Inquiry 48, 131–150 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-013-9411-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-013-9411-z