Why Disgust Is A Beneficial Virtue For Society

Courage, temperance, humility, gratitude, justice, and patience – what these values have in common is that they are highly coveted virtues. Possessing them distinguishes a person’s character as being morally well-regarded. What is a virtue, at its core, if not behavior that exhibits high moral standards? But to have high moral standards, you must be discriminate in which values to adopt. As Scientific American explains, the dominant philosophical view of moral development sees becoming virtuous as a process whereby you transform problematic emotions; the cowardly person’s fear is transformed into the courageous person’s emotional attunement to danger. 

If we apply this to the notion of disgust (a feeling of revulsion or strong disapproval of something unpleasant or offensive), an emotion that is generally upheld as something negative, we can see that it is the foil to other well-respected virtues like tolerance, acceptance, and compassion. Tolerance of intolerance, for example, cancels out the virtue’s own objectives, so we see that tolerance, acceptance, and compassion can not and should not be extended to all things. This is where disgust comes into play, for as much as we love to tell ourselves that we are rational beings who have arrived at our conclusions from careful deliberation, debate, and scrutinizing judgment, most of our values arise from much more primal sources – our biologically endowed temperaments. Some people are temperamentally more disgust-sensitive than others, and this makes them value different things. One of the most consistent predictors of political leanings is disgust sensitivity, with conservatives ranking as significantly more responsive to disgusting images than liberals. 

Your Disgust Response Is a Strong Indicator of Your Political Views

In a study that scanned the brains of subjects looking at a variety of neutral and emotionally evocative pictures, participants were asked to answer questions to gauge their social and political views on highly contested issues. The results of this study found that conservative brains reacted much more strongly to disgusting images like filthy toilets, mutilated animals, and sore-adorned faces. The stimulation in certain parts of the brain in response to disgusting images was such a strong predictor of political ideology that neuroscientist Read Montague could predict if a participant was liberal or conservative with 95% accuracy. That’s right, how you instinctually feel about gore, vomit, and the smell of feces correlates to your views on gay marriage, immigration, and sexual purity.

This has been found in many different studies – that disgust sensitivity is correlated with political beliefs and attitudes, but also that it can influence people’s monetary values. One study found that manipulation of cleanliness affected participants’ moral judgments, with an increase in cleanliness having a positive correlation with harsher moral judgments on contested issues like abortion and pornography. 

Disgust sensitivity is correlated with political beliefs and attitudes and can influence people’s monetary values. 

Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek did a comparative study on liberals and conservatives to assess how liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. The researchers found that differences in disgust response cause liberals and conservatives to have profoundly different moral values. Specifically, liberals care more about issues relating to harm and fairness, whereas conservatives are concerned about purity. Libertarians had the lowest sacredness score, making them "the least outraged and most open to contractualizing moral violations." Temperamentally, libertarians are much more similar to liberals than conservatives, as libertarians have the lowest disgust response of all three groups and, likewise, showed less refusal to violate moral foundations for money.

Disgust – The Good, the Bad, and the Useful

We often hear about the negative side effects of an improperly calibrated disgust response – xenophobia, racism, condemnation of the sick and poor, and rigid views on sexual purity. It’s true that stronger feelings of disgust are associated with black-and-white thinking. That is, something is either good or it isn’t – there’s no middle ground or room for nuance. This is emblematic in the link between germophobia and xenophobia or in the correlation between high disgust and anorexia. This is because disgust revolves around thoughts about contamination and purity.

However, disgust isn’t without any societal utility. As we have evolved, nature selected for its presence in our brain chemistry throughout human history for a reason. It’s this desire to avoid contamination that has helped us identify ways to stop the spread of pathogens and diseases that threaten our very existence. Concern about sexual purity can be traced back to fears of life-threatening sexually transmitted diseases. Disgust at depravity helps us identify harm committed against others, such as sexual violations, murder, dishonesty, and betrayal. The absence of disgust, at its extremes, can lead us down dangerous and concerning paths, like sociopathy, brutality, and a society ravaged by filth and disease. 

Psychopaths, who are overrepresented in our prison populations for a reason, show damage to some of the circuits in the brain involved in disgust, as do people with Huntington’s disease, who also experience diminished empathy. The real-world ramifications of this lack of disgust and empathy can be a gruesome and shocking display of violence and law-breaking in the case of psychopaths. In the case of Huntington’s disease, people afflicted with the condition are not grossed out by something like touching feces with their bare hands, which can mean a reduced incentive for cleanliness. 

Why Disgust Plays an Important Role in Morality

Just as an improperly calibrated disgust response can cause us to condemn, ostracize, and shun those who may not be deserving based on an irrational emotion, so too can an improperly calibrated disgust response put us in danger and jeopardize our health. Disgust is useful and necessary to punish and deter moral societal evils like sexual predation, murder, stealing, and abuse. In recent years, I’ve witnessed a worrying push to “deconstruct” our biases and destigmatize virtually everything. The modern liberal views disgust as an emotion that an irrational, prejudiced Neanderthal feels, and so it must be purged from our modern world, where rationality is king. However, the consequences of such a mentality have been concerning – a push to over-sympathize with murderers, legitimize pedophilia as a sexual orientation, and accept the mutilation of our children as progressive gender-affirming care. 

"Repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity." - Leon Kass

Disgust helps us identify, on an instinctual level, when something is deeply wrong. If we were to use pure rationality to discuss why incest or necrophilia or why creating human-like child sex dolls is wrong, we would be missing a key human component of the picture in our articulation, which is to discount the heinousness of the issue. It’s something approximating empathy, but it’s not that alone. It’s something unspeakable, almost sacred. It’s about human dignity and a healthy psychology. A child sex robot may not have any consciousness and not experience any harm, but we intuit the perverseness of enabling the indulgences of something that is deeply wicked, like pedophilia. That is, even when there is no direct victim per se, we still feel that a great injustice is being inflicted against children as a group by this revolting appeasement of sexual parasitism. It is worthy of our revulsion. As we enter into an increasingly digitized age, where artificial intelligence is just in its infancy and will enable us to do things never before thought possible, this human dignity aspect of our species must remain intact. 

American academic Leon Kass, discussing the wisdom of repugnance as it relates to the moral issue of cloning humans, gave a profound quote that sums up exactly why disgust is a beneficial virtue that society should not soon eradicate. He says, “Repugnance, here as elsewhere, revolts against the excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound.” 

He continues, “Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”

Closing Thoughts

Disgust guides us, preventing us from going into the forbidden territory that human wisdom tells us we should stay away from. It provides us with incentives to punish moral wrongdoing and put consequences in place for violating these moral rules. The fact that disgust can be over-amplified in certain people and result in punishment that is too strict or too harsh is not an argument against the utility of the emotion in general. Someone who is clinically depressed may need psychological treatment, but experiencing grief and depression following the death of a loved one is a perfectly normal psychological response. We should be wary of the profound power of disgust, as societies that have over-pronounced disgust can have authoritarian, tyrannical structures, but that doesn’t mean we dismantle the whole system and discount our natural ability to know right from wrong. 

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