This paper attempts to explain how and why nonhuman animals elicit disgust in human beings. I argue that animals elicit disgust in two ways. One is by triggering disease–protection mechanisms, and the other is by eliciting mortality salience, or thoughts of death. I discuss how these two types of disgust operate and defend their conceptual and theoretical coherence against common objections. I also outline an explanatory challenge for disgust researchers. Both types of disgust indicate that a wide variety of animals (...) produce aversive and avoidant reactions in human beings. This seems somewhat odd, given the prominence of animals in human lives. The challenge, then, is explaining how humans cope with the presence of animals. I propose, as a hypothesis for further exploration, that we cope with animals, and our disgust responses to them, by attributing mental states that mark them as inferior beings. To develop my proposal, I draw from recent research on dehumanization and infrahumanization. (shrink)

The self-ownership thesis asserts, roughly, that agents own their minds and bodies in the same way that they can own extra-personal property. One common strategy for defending the self-ownership thesis is to show that it accords with our intuitions about the wrongness of various acts involving the expropriation of body parts. We challenge this line of defense. We argue that disgust explains our resistance to these sorts of cases and present results from an original psychological experiment in support of this (...) hypothesis. We argue further that learning that disgust is responsible for pro-self-ownership intuitions should reduce our confidence in those intuitions. After considering and rejecting some prominent “debunking” arguments predicated on disgust’s evolutionary history, we provide alternative reasons for thinking that disgust is not a reliable source of moral judgments. Rejecting the reliability of disgust as a mechanism for producing moral beliefs coheres with our considered judgments about the general kinds of considerations that are morally relevant and a range of particular moral problems. (shrink)

Psychological research has been discovering a number of puzzling features of morality and moral cognition recently.2 Zhong & Liljenquist (2006) found that when people are asked to think about an unethical deed or recall one they themselves have committed in the past, issues of physical cleanliness become salient. Zhong & Liljenquist cleverly designate this phenomenon the “Macbeth Effect,” and it takes some interesting forms. For instance, reading a story describing an immoral deed increased people’s desire for products related to cleansing, (...) like a shower soap, disinfectants, or antiseptic wipes. Moreover, Zhong & Liljenquist found that cleaning one’s hands after describing a past unethical deed actually reduced moral emotions such as guilt and shame. So much so that those who did “wash away their sins” were less likely than other participants to help out a.. (shrink)