Something that you disapprove of should be something you consider immoral, or else it’s nonsensical to say that you disapprove of it.
Disapproval—in the sense being discussed in this thread—is an emotional response. An alief, not a belief. The entire point of what I wrote to Swimmer963 was to encourage her to rationally evaluate whether her feelings were just an irrational “ugh” field rather than a justified moral disapproval.
By default, our brains use ugh fields for moral reasoning, and generate moral reasons after the feeling of disgust pops up. This is, as far as I know, quite settled science at this point.
Really, the core of my objection is to the notion, apparently expressed by pjeby, that we just shouldn’t approve or disapprove of people’s behaviors, or of people on the basis of their behaviors.
Actually, “shouldn’t” is too strong; I’m simply saying it’s not really that useful. If a bunch of LWers got to living together in one place, then it might be useful to go around automatically having ugh feelings about certain behaviors, because it would actually do something positive for group norms. But most of us live in situations where any impact our disapproval might have on something is likely outweighed by dozens of competing forms of disapproval going in different directions.
Do understand, though, that “disapproval” here is strictly referring to automatic feelings of revulsion. It is quite possible to decide that a behavior has negative utility or that your life would be better off without having to interact with someone enacting that behavior, without having any automatic feelings of revulsion being involved.
Disapproval—in the sense being discussed in this thread—is an emotional response. An alief, not a belief. The entire point of what I wrote to Swimmer963 was to encourage her to rationally evaluate whether her feelings were just an irrational “ugh” field rather than a justified moral disapproval.
By default, our brains use ugh fields for moral reasoning, and generate moral reasons after the feeling of disgust pops up. This is, as far as I know, quite settled science at this point.
Actually, “shouldn’t” is too strong; I’m simply saying it’s not really that useful. If a bunch of LWers got to living together in one place, then it might be useful to go around automatically having ugh feelings about certain behaviors, because it would actually do something positive for group norms. But most of us live in situations where any impact our disapproval might have on something is likely outweighed by dozens of competing forms of disapproval going in different directions.
Do understand, though, that “disapproval” here is strictly referring to automatic feelings of revulsion. It is quite possible to decide that a behavior has negative utility or that your life would be better off without having to interact with someone enacting that behavior, without having any automatic feelings of revulsion being involved.
Is that clearer now?