A very interesting article by John Wilson in the Globe Ideas section looks at the benefits and costs of the feeling of disgust.
William Ian Miller defends the morality of the emotion:
Disgust is quite fallible as a moral guide, Miller admitted, yet he nevertheless argued that a well-cultivated sense of disgust is essential to our moral intuitions... Kass argued that in "crucial cases" -- father-daughter incest and the mutilation of corpses, for example -- "repugnance is the emotional expression of a deep wisdom, beyond reason's power to fully articulate it."
Wilson points out that disgust also has a very practical, biological purpose: "A study released by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in February concluded that disgust is an evolutionary response to the threat of disease." And this feeling has the power to profitably direct one's actions: "Self-disgust is an indispensable engine of reform."
On the other side, Martha Nussbaum argues that we must conquer our primitive sense of disgust:
In particular, she wants to draw attention to the way in which disgust has often gone hand-in-hand with prejudice (she cites "the central locus of disgust in today's United States: male loathing of the male homosexual"). In this connection her argument has an immediate practical application to the law.At a deeper level, however, Nussbaum's argument is not simply about the law, but about a whole conception of human society and what it means to be human. As she puts it, "The book is intended, ultimately, as an essay about the psychological foundations of liberalism, about the institutional and developmental conditions for the sustenance of a liberal respect for human equality."
Nussbaum uncompromisingly rejects the usefulness of disgust as a moral guide. If an act involves coercion or harm to a person -- as in Kass's example of father-daughter incest -- that will be sufficient basis for moral or legal judgment, whether or not the harm is of a kind that particularly excites disgust. If it involves no harm, then the action in question should not be prohibited in the first place.
Nussbaum says we can do better by constructing a logical, idea-based morality. For we remember fondly when Katharine Hepburn said, "Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above." (Or if you're into more modern cinema, you might rather echo Paul Atreides: "Fear is the mind-killer." These are all good quotes for color, btw.)
In any case, this is a great example of a tension that exists within every human consciousness -- how to navigate the self through a network of pleasures and pains generated by our instincts (and upbringing and society, of course).
Hnh. This part of religion in Dune is rather Buddhist seeming, isn't it? Fear, like pain, is only a feeling. Let it go.
It also brings to mind the sort of mental, logical discipline that proves most effective in financial investing. I'll get to this big subject in another post, at some point.
You can ping this entry by using http://www.mindtangle.net/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/791 .
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