The Ick-Ought Problem
uspolIn the US our shared sense of reality is strained even more than usual.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that we use the same part of the brain for both moral disgust and physical disgust. Neurobiologists’ explanation goes something like this: since the concept of moral wrong is new on evolutionary timescales (<50,000 years) selection has coopted a part of the brain that was chiefly evolved for somthing else, namely, detecting and rejecting food/water that might make us sick, to also help modulate our understanding moral and social limits. So we end up have trouble telling the difference between something that’s morally wrong and something that just disgusts us due to, say, unfamiliarity. In our confusion we intellectually conflate “different” or “unfamiliar” with “wrong” – after all, they feel really similar – and hang on to the possibly erroneous conclusion even upon minor reflection. Some of us even settle on the idea that “icky = bad” is a decent rule of thumb to live by. 1
I’m guessing that a lot of people aren’t aware of this little caveat about how our brains work and even if they were, they wouldn’t have the energy or time to re-legislate a lifetime of their own beliefs. Worse, this source of cognitive confusion is vulnerable to external manipulation. It’s pretty easy to think of examples where disgust is used to sway opinions on a variety of topics: pastors preaching in exaggerated detail to their flocks about supposedly deviant sex acts, nationalist leaders calling cities “vermin infested”, pro-lifers marching with bloody abortion graphics on placards, animal rights activists displaying graphic slaughterhouse imagery, health advocacy or advertising showing you rotten teeth or diseased lungs, human rights activists showing you people living in squalor, etc. If you want to create or reinforce a moral belief, this imagery can help you do it by appealing to disgust rather than reason alone. If you can go a step further and directly associate your villainous opposition with these feelings of disgust, you might be able to create or worsen a factional social division.
There are other ways this mechanism can circumvent reason. A visceral disgust reaction might lead us to miss or ignore any information we could otherwise get from a person, group or phenomenon. This sort of emotional override undermines our ability to update our view of the world based on new information. It can even start to erode your ability to see other humans as people, e.g. “if you are proudly voting for [candidate] then I have no respect for you as a human being.” If you cut yourself off from potentially useful sources of information solely based on disgust-based distrust, or if you stop seeing other people as human, the threads that connect our little islands of reality can snap.
Can a culture or nation survive at these extreme limits of tension and fracturing? I suspect it can’t, and I think it would be useful for us to at least acknowledge that disgust can confuse our sense of right and wrong, and that while it might be impossible to stop and radically revisit all of our beliefs, we can at least try to form a habit of paying closer attention when our sense of disgust is potentially messing with our ability to accurately judge people or events.
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I’m aware that evo-psych explanations are often just-so stories, but it seems like this is not that sort of thing; there is evidence for both the age of the adaptation and live activation of the brain areas seen in fMRI. Happy to be corrected though. ↩︎