That doesn’t seem right to me. My thinking is that disgust comes from the need to avoid things which cause and spread illness. On the other hand, things I consider more central to morality seem to have evolved for different needs [these are just off-the-cuff speculations for the origins]:
Love—seems to be generalized from parental nurturing instincts, which address the need to ensure your offspring thrive
Friendliness—seems to have stemmed from the basic fact that cooperation is beneficial
Empathy—seems to be a side-effect of the way our brains model conspecifics (the easiest way to model someone else is to emulate them with your own brain, which happens to make you feel things)
These all seem to be part of a Cooperation attractor which is where the pressure to generalize/keep these instincts comes from. I think of the Logic/reflectivity stuff as noticing this and developing it further.
Disgust seems unsavory to me because it dampens each of the above feelings (including making the logic/reflectivity stuff more difficult). That’s not to say I think it’s completely absent form human morality, it just doesn’t seem like it’s where it comes from.
(As far as Enforcement goes, it seems like Anger and Fear are much more important than Disgust.)
I agree there’s an important cooperator/friendly/love attractor, but, it seems like ignoring a lot of what people actually use the word morality for to dismiss disgust. It might be right that it’s not central to the parts of morality you care about but historically morality clearly includes tons of:
dictating sexual mores (“homosexuality is disgusting”)
how to cook food (i.e. keeping kosher)
I think Leviticus has stuff on how to handle disease [goes and checks… yep! “When anyone has a swelling or a rash or a bright spot on his skin that may become an infectious skin disease, he must be brought to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons who is a priest.”]
The Untouchables in the caste system.
You can say “okay but those parts of morality are either actively bad, or, we can recover them through empathy”, and maybe that’s right, but, it’s still a significant part of how many people relate to morality and your story of what’s going on with it needs to account for that.
I think that people have a sense of things that seem unhealthy that are to be avoided, and this originally was “literal disease” (which you do want to coordinate with your group to avoid), as well as “this social fabric feels sort of diseased and I don’t want to be near it.”
But, most importantly: I think “disgust” (or very similar emotions) are how logic / reflectivity gets implemented. This is conjecture, but, my current bet is something like “we had a prior that elegant things tend to be healthy, inelegant things tend to be broken or diseased or fucked up somehow.” And that translated into things philosophers/priests/judges having a sense of “hmm, I notice our morality is being inconsistent. That feels off/wrong.” And this is the mechanism by which reflective moral systems are able to bootstrap. (Then cultural apparatus gets layered on top such that disgust is often fairly removed from what’s going on locally).
(I sometimes feel like my own sense here feels disgust-oriented, and sometimes it’s a slightly different “responding to ugliness” that feels different from disgust, but closely related)
I see that stuff as at best an unfortunate crutch for living in a harsher world, and which otherwise is a blemish on morality. I agree that it is a major part of what many people consider to be morality, but I think people who still think it’s important are just straightforwardly wrong.
I don’t think disgust is important for logic / reflectivity. Personally, it feels like it’s more of a “unsatisfactory” feeling. A bowl with a large crack, and a bowl with mold in it are both unsatisfactory in this sense, but only the latter is disgusting. Additionally, it seems like people who are good at logic/math/precise thinking seem to care less about disgust (as morality), and highly reflective people seem to care even less about it.
ETA: Which isn’t to say I’d be surprised if some people do use their disgust instinct for logical/reflective reasoning. I just think that if we lived in the world where that main thing going on, people good at that kind of stuff would tend to be more bigoted (in a reflectively endorsed way) and religious fundamentalism would not be as strong of an attractor as it apparently is.
I agree “unsatisfactory” is different from disgust. I think people vary in which emotions end up loadbearing for them.
I know rationalists who feel disgust reactions to people who have unclean “epistemic hygiene”, or who knowingly let themselves into situations where their epistemics will be reliably fucked.
For that matter, in the OP, some people are responding to regular ol’ criminal morality with disgust, and while you (or Jim, or in fact, me) can say “man I really don’t trust people who run their morality off disgust”, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’d, for example, work well if you simply removed disgust from the equation for everyone – it might turn out to be loadbearing to how society is function.
I’m not sure if we disagree about a particular thing here, because, like, it’s not like you’re exactly proposing to snap your fingers and eliminate disgust from human morality unilaterally (but it sounds like you might be encouraging people to silence/ignore their disgust reactions, without tracking that this may be important for how some significant fraction of people are currently tracking morality, in a way that would destroy a lot of important information and coordination mechanism if you didn’t more thoughtfully replace it with other things)
I agree high reflectivity people probably have less disgust-oriented morality (because yeah, disgust-morality is often not well thought out or coherent), but I just have a general precautionary principle against throwing out emotional information.
I, uh, maybe want to summon @divia who might have more specific thoughts here.
Yeah, that’s not what I’m suggesting. I think the thing I want to encourage is basically just to be more reflective on the margin of disgust-based reactions (when it concerns other people). I agree it would be bad to throw it out unilaterally, and probably not a good idea for most people to silence or ignore it. At the same time, I think it’s good to treat appeals to disgust with suspicion in moral debates (which was the main point I was trying to make) (especially since disgust in particular seems to be a more “contagious” emotion for reasons that make sense in the context of infectious diseases but usually not beyond that, making appeals to it more “dark arts-y”).
As far as the more object-level debate on whether disgust is important for things like epistemic hygiene, I expect it to be somewhere where people will vary, so I think we probably agree here too.
I meant wrong in the sense of universal human morality (to the extent that’s a coherent thing). But yes, on an individual level your values are just your values.
That doesn’t seem right to me. My thinking is that disgust comes from the need to avoid things which cause and spread illness. On the other hand, things I consider more central to morality seem to have evolved for different needs [these are just off-the-cuff speculations for the origins]:
Love—seems to be generalized from parental nurturing instincts, which address the need to ensure your offspring thrive
Friendliness—seems to have stemmed from the basic fact that cooperation is beneficial
Empathy—seems to be a side-effect of the way our brains model conspecifics (the easiest way to model someone else is to emulate them with your own brain, which happens to make you feel things)
These all seem to be part of a Cooperation attractor which is where the pressure to generalize/keep these instincts comes from. I think of the Logic/reflectivity stuff as noticing this and developing it further.
Disgust seems unsavory to me because it dampens each of the above feelings (including making the logic/reflectivity stuff more difficult). That’s not to say I think it’s completely absent form human morality, it just doesn’t seem like it’s where it comes from.
(As far as Enforcement goes, it seems like Anger and Fear are much more important than Disgust.)
I agree there’s an important cooperator/friendly/love attractor, but, it seems like ignoring a lot of what people actually use the word morality for to dismiss disgust. It might be right that it’s not central to the parts of morality you care about but historically morality clearly includes tons of:
dictating sexual mores (“homosexuality is disgusting”)
how to cook food (i.e. keeping kosher)
I think Leviticus has stuff on how to handle disease [goes and checks… yep! “When anyone has a swelling or a rash or a bright spot on his skin that may become an infectious skin disease, he must be brought to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons who is a priest.”]
The Untouchables in the caste system.
You can say “okay but those parts of morality are either actively bad, or, we can recover them through empathy”, and maybe that’s right, but, it’s still a significant part of how many people relate to morality and your story of what’s going on with it needs to account for that.
I think that people have a sense of things that seem unhealthy that are to be avoided, and this originally was “literal disease” (which you do want to coordinate with your group to avoid), as well as “this social fabric feels sort of diseased and I don’t want to be near it.”
But, most importantly: I think “disgust” (or very similar emotions) are how logic / reflectivity gets implemented. This is conjecture, but, my current bet is something like “we had a prior that elegant things tend to be healthy, inelegant things tend to be broken or diseased or fucked up somehow.” And that translated into things philosophers/priests/judges having a sense of “hmm, I notice our morality is being inconsistent. That feels off/wrong.” And this is the mechanism by which reflective moral systems are able to bootstrap. (Then cultural apparatus gets layered on top such that disgust is often fairly removed from what’s going on locally).
(I sometimes feel like my own sense here feels disgust-oriented, and sometimes it’s a slightly different “responding to ugliness” that feels different from disgust, but closely related)
I see that stuff as at best an unfortunate crutch for living in a harsher world, and which otherwise is a blemish on morality. I agree that it is a major part of what many people consider to be morality, but I think people who still think it’s important are just straightforwardly wrong.
I don’t think disgust is important for logic / reflectivity. Personally, it feels like it’s more of a “unsatisfactory” feeling. A bowl with a large crack, and a bowl with mold in it are both unsatisfactory in this sense, but only the latter is disgusting. Additionally, it seems like people who are good at logic/math/precise thinking seem to care less about disgust (as morality), and highly reflective people seem to care even less about it.
ETA: Which isn’t to say I’d be surprised if some people do use their disgust instinct for logical/reflective reasoning. I just think that if we lived in the world where that main thing going on, people good at that kind of stuff would tend to be more bigoted (in a reflectively endorsed way) and religious fundamentalism would not be as strong of an attractor as it apparently is.
I agree “unsatisfactory” is different from disgust. I think people vary in which emotions end up loadbearing for them.
I know rationalists who feel disgust reactions to people who have unclean “epistemic hygiene”, or who knowingly let themselves into situations where their epistemics will be reliably fucked.
For that matter, in the OP, some people are responding to regular ol’ criminal morality with disgust, and while you (or Jim, or in fact, me) can say “man I really don’t trust people who run their morality off disgust”, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’d, for example, work well if you simply removed disgust from the equation for everyone – it might turn out to be loadbearing to how society is function.
I’m not sure if we disagree about a particular thing here, because, like, it’s not like you’re exactly proposing to snap your fingers and eliminate disgust from human morality unilaterally (but it sounds like you might be encouraging people to silence/ignore their disgust reactions, without tracking that this may be important for how some significant fraction of people are currently tracking morality, in a way that would destroy a lot of important information and coordination mechanism if you didn’t more thoughtfully replace it with other things)
I agree high reflectivity people probably have less disgust-oriented morality (because yeah, disgust-morality is often not well thought out or coherent), but I just have a general precautionary principle against throwing out emotional information.
I, uh, maybe want to summon @divia who might have more specific thoughts here.
Yeah, that’s not what I’m suggesting. I think the thing I want to encourage is basically just to be more reflective on the margin of disgust-based reactions (when it concerns other people). I agree it would be bad to throw it out unilaterally, and probably not a good idea for most people to silence or ignore it. At the same time, I think it’s good to treat appeals to disgust with suspicion in moral debates (which was the main point I was trying to make) (especially since disgust in particular seems to be a more “contagious” emotion for reasons that make sense in the context of infectious diseases but usually not beyond that, making appeals to it more “dark arts-y”).
As far as the more object-level debate on whether disgust is important for things like epistemic hygiene, I expect it to be somewhere where people will vary, so I think we probably agree here too.
This seems obviously a value judgment that one cannot be “wrong” about.
I meant wrong in the sense of universal human morality (to the extent that’s a coherent thing). But yes, on an individual level your values are just your values.