In my field we differentiate between two kinds of disgust. Psychologists call strong reactions to pathogens, toxins or parasites physical or core disgust. It’s the kind you have likely experienced when you came upon rotten food, or corners filled with the smell of urine or vomit. Our revulsion when we encounter bad smells or horrible sights has likely an evolutionary advantage: it protects us from getting infected or contaminated.
The second kind of disgust is called moral disgust. When we see a blatant violation of moral norms we react with disgust as well. Think cannibalism, or bestiality, or betrayal, for example. Since it is linked to “norms”, it is potentially malleable – it can change when norms evolve. Consider society’s relationship, overall, to homosexuality, for example. The majority of people luckily no longer feel moral disgust, when that used to be the status quo.
Scientists have been eagerly exploring the brain mechanisms behind disgust reactions, and in particular whether core and moral disgust share neural pathways. (Short answer: some studies say yes, others say no, pointing to confounds in the kind of stimuli used to test these hypotheses.)
You know what: I couldn’t care less. What I am curious about is whether there is a hierarchy of moral disgust topics, and if people who vary on other dimensions (how conservative they are, how risk tolerant they are, where they fit on social anxiety scales, or any number of such variables that make us the person we are,) have certain things that disgust them more than others. I am no longer actively involved in research, so I will not be able to answer these questions. But I can provide an example of what I mean.
Quick: What breach of ethics really gets to you? What is the most morally revulsive thing you’ve come across in the last weeks? (Note the first question could be answered in the abstract, from experiences across a lifetime. The second question relates to something that is happening now. I make that distinction, because I experience multiple cases of revulsion just listening to the current news. That was not always the case. For example, corruption would not have been particularly salient in my mind some 20 years ago.)
In any case, I would have come up with two different answers to the second question, dependent on when you’d asked me. About a week ago, very, very high on the list would have been the immeasurable damage done to vulnerable, young populations by discouraging or withholding vaccinations or other health measures proven to stave off suffering. The willful dismissal of scientific data, the eugenic underpinnings of withholding of care, all are ethical breaches that disgust me. We have seen it here with the explosion of measles. Gentle reminder: the disease not only kills some people, it also can sterilize young boys never to be parents, and wipes your body’s memory of prior infections, leaving you without built-up immunity against multiple prior illnesses. It is also the case that the loss of herd immunity, with not enough people getting vaccinated, is potentially lethal to those who are NOT ABLE to be vaccinated.
It gets worse, though. With the help of a Danish research group, long-time vaccine opponent RFK Jr, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is now experimenting with withholding hepatitis B vaccines from some African newborns. (They could never do this research in the US – so far at least, for lack of ethics.) The plan is to enroll 14,000 infants in Guinea-Bissau (a country where Hepatitis B is rampant) in the trial, giving the hepatitis B vaccine to half of the babies at birth and withholding it from the others for the first six weeks of life. (A plan that caused international uproar last year, and has now somehow been green lit by pressure from and funding by the US government.)
“You are now enrolling newborns in a lottery to test a hypothesis,” said one of the researchers who resigned in protest from the organization, together with several other colleagues. ” The children who are randomly selected not to receive the birth dose of the vaccine, those who “lost the lottery,” face in their earliest days the risk of contracting hepatitis B, which can cause irreversible lifelong damage. “They contract hepatitis B in the context of being part of a research project, which made their infection happen, in effect, “by design”. (Ref.) We do know, after all, that the vaccine works and protect against the disease!
If you asked me about what ethical transgression disgusts me most this week, the answer would be not the recent betrayal of our ally Ukraine (inconceivable, on so many dimensions), but the suggested live-streaming of a public execution by firing squad of a paralyzed man in a wheelchair. In this instance I am joined by many, not just a bunch of ethical Danish researchers. The Pope, heads of major Catholic (USCCB), evangelical (NAE), mainline (Episcopal Church) and Jewish (Union for Reform Judaism) orgs/denominations have all come out against the planned public execution. So did retired Admiral William H. McRaven, calling it shameless and ignoble.
It is particularly dire in the historical context of lynchings in this country. Public killings have a racial history, after all.
We are joining Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia, North Korea and Saudi America with this act (should it take place.) As Ruth Ben – Ghiat, a historian of fascism explained: “This is an escalation of an attempt to normalize extreme violence, ritualize violence, militarize the country, and make violence entertaining, so when they ask you to commit violence in their name, you will be ready.”
(The word fascism, by the way, has its root in the Italian term fascia: a bundle of sticks or sheaf, with an ax. It is symbolic for state violence and execution. The demonstrative exposure of state cruelty is one of the hallmarks of fascism.)
The best explanation of why this spectacle is undermining everything our nation claims to stand for, can be found here: historian Tim Snyder lays out what is wrong with public executions. He explains why it is psychologically, politically and historically wrong, He ends by describing the ethical horror it promotes:
It is wrong ethically. It will not be hard to find external authorities who can help us to see this. The United Nations human rights office can remind us that a public execution is a form of torture. The president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops can tell us that a livestreamed public execution is a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death.” But we, all of us, all Americans, are being invited to observe and thus participate; the ethics of this are accessible to each of us, personally, as living human beings. The end of life is a mystery, one which arises from the dignity of life. No matter what an individual has done, the end of each life should be respected, for the sake of the dignity of life itself.
Death as a spectacle is, plain and simple, disgusting.
Music today is the newest album of Berlin-based Ghost Dubs, echoing the Halloween photographs from my neighborhood.