The thing that has me all a’wuckled here is that I think morality basically comes from disgust. (or: a mix of disgust, anger, logic/reflectivity, empathy and some aesthetic appreciation for some classes of things).
I do share “people who seem to be operating entirely off disgust with no reflectivity feel dangerous to me”, but, I think a proper human morality somehow accounts for disgust having actually been an important part of how it was birthed.
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.
There’s a philosophy called “emotivism” that seems to be along these lines. “Emotivism is a meta-ethical view that claims that ethical sentences do not express propositions but emotional attitudes.”
I can see a couple of ways to read it (not having looked too closely). The first is “Everyone’s ethical statements are actually just expressions of emotion. And, as we all know, emotions are frequently illogical and inappropriate to the situation. Therefore, everything anyone has ever said or will say about ethics is untrustworthy, and can reasonably be dismissed.” This strikes me as alarming, and dangerous if any adherents were in charge of anything important.
The second reading is something like, “When humans implement ethical judgments—e.g. deciding that the thief deserves punishment—we make our emotions into whatever is appropriate to carry out the actions we’ve decided upon (e.g. anger towards the thief). Emotions are an output of the final judgment, and are always a necessary component of applying the judgment. However, the entire process leading up to the final judgment isn’t necessarily emotional; we can try, and expect the best of us to usually succeed, at making that process conform to principles like logical consistency.” That I would be on board with. But… that seems like a “well, duh” which I expect most people would agree with, and if that was what the emotivists meant, I don’t see why they would express themselves the way they seem to.
I think a proper human morality somehow accounts for disgust having actually been an important part of how it was birthed.
I’m not sure if people maintain consistent distinctions between legal philosophy, ethics, and morality. But for whatever it is that governs our response to crimes, I think anger / desire-for-revenge is a more important part of it. Also the impulse to respond to threats (“Criminal on the streets! Who’s he coming for next?”), which I guess is fear and/or anger.
Come to think of it, if I try to think of things that people declare “immoral” that seem to come from disgust rather than fear or anger, I think of restrictions on sexual behavior (e.g. homosexuality, promiscuity) and drugs, which I think the law shouldn’t touch (except in forms where someone was injured nonconsensually, in which case revenge-anger comes into play). As emotions go, I think I’d distrust disgust more than the others.
I know some people with disgust reactions to bad epistemics (that are at least morally tinged, if not explicitly part of the person’s morality).
I think “disgust for in-elegance” is actually an important component on how “desire for consistency / reflectively fair rules” gets implemented in humans (at least. for the philosophers and lawmakers who set in motion the rules/culture that other people absorb via a less-opinionated “monkey see monkey do”)
I recall some discussion of one paper claiming conservatives had higher disgust response, but this was in part becaused they asked questions about “what do you think about homosexuality” and not “what do you think about cutting up books” or “not recycling”, etc (I think the book-cutting up purity response isn’t quite disgust-mediated, at least for me, but it’s at least adjacent).
None of that is a strong claim about exactly how important disgust is to morality, either now or historically, but, I think there’s at least more to it than you’re alluding to.
The idea that ethical statements are anything more than “just expressions of emotion” is, to paraphrase Lucretius (EDIT: misattributed; it’s from Gibbon), “regarded by the common people as true, by the wise[1] as false, and by rulers as useful.”
Alarming and dangerous as this view may be, I’d be really surprised if literally everyone who had power (“in charge of anything important”) also lacked the self-awareness to see it.
The idea that ethical statements are anything more than “just expressions of emotion” is, to paraphrase Lucretius, “regarded by the common people as true, by the wise[1] as false, and by rulers as useful.”
I figure you think the wise are correct. Well, then. Consider randomly selected paragraphs from Supreme Court justices’ opinions. Or consider someone saying “I’d like to throw this guy in jail, but unfortunately, the evidence we have is not admissible in court, and the judicial precedent on rules of evidence is there for a reason—it limits the potential abusiveness of the police, and that’s more important than occasionally letting a criminal off—so we have to let him go.” Is that an ethical statement? And is it “just an expression of emotion”?
For the record, in an ethical context, when I say a behavior is bad, I mean that (a) an ethical person shouldn’t do it (or at least should have an aversion to doing it—extreme circumstances might make it the best option) and (b) ethical people have license to punish it in some way, which, depending on the specifics, might range from “social disapproval” to “the force of the law”.
Alarming and dangerous as this view may be, I’d be really surprised if literally everyone who had power (“in charge of anything important”) also lacked the self-awareness to see it.
I think there are lots of people in power who are amoral, and this is indeed dangerous, and does indeed frequently lead to them harming people they rule over.
However, I don’t think most of them become amoral by reading emotivist philosophy or by independently coming to the conclusion that ethical statements are “just expressions of emotion”. What makes rulers frequently immoral? Some have hypothesized that there’s an evolved response to higher social status, to become more psychopathic. Some have said that being psychopathic makes people more likely to succeed at the fight to become a ruler. It’s also possible that they notice that, in their powerful position, they’re unlikely to face consequences for bad things they do, and… they either motivatedly find reasons to drop their ethical principles, or never held them in the first place.
I was being glib because you made some favorable (iyo) remark about the views of the people “in charge”.
I don’t actually think the “wise” I made up are entirely correct; that was just to make my paraphrase hew to the original quote about religion. Ethical statements are also tools for social signaling and status-seeking, which the “rulers” understand implicitly, among whom it is their primary purpose.
When I say a behavior is bad, it’s almost always merely an expression of my preferences. (I say almost to leave open the possibility that I might need to engage in social signaling sometimes.) But yes, I agree that all good people ought to share them and punish those who don’t.
The thing that has me all a’wuckled here is that I think morality basically comes from disgust. (or: a mix of disgust, anger, logic/reflectivity, empathy and some aesthetic appreciation for some classes of things).
I do share “people who seem to be operating entirely off disgust with no reflectivity feel dangerous to me”, but, I think a proper human morality somehow accounts for disgust having actually been an important part of how it was birthed.
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.
There’s a philosophy called “emotivism” that seems to be along these lines. “Emotivism is a meta-ethical view that claims that ethical sentences do not express propositions but emotional attitudes.”
I can see a couple of ways to read it (not having looked too closely). The first is “Everyone’s ethical statements are actually just expressions of emotion. And, as we all know, emotions are frequently illogical and inappropriate to the situation. Therefore, everything anyone has ever said or will say about ethics is untrustworthy, and can reasonably be dismissed.” This strikes me as alarming, and dangerous if any adherents were in charge of anything important.
The second reading is something like, “When humans implement ethical judgments—e.g. deciding that the thief deserves punishment—we make our emotions into whatever is appropriate to carry out the actions we’ve decided upon (e.g. anger towards the thief). Emotions are an output of the final judgment, and are always a necessary component of applying the judgment. However, the entire process leading up to the final judgment isn’t necessarily emotional; we can try, and expect the best of us to usually succeed, at making that process conform to principles like logical consistency.” That I would be on board with. But… that seems like a “well, duh” which I expect most people would agree with, and if that was what the emotivists meant, I don’t see why they would express themselves the way they seem to.
I’m not sure if people maintain consistent distinctions between legal philosophy, ethics, and morality. But for whatever it is that governs our response to crimes, I think anger / desire-for-revenge is a more important part of it. Also the impulse to respond to threats (“Criminal on the streets! Who’s he coming for next?”), which I guess is fear and/or anger.
Come to think of it, if I try to think of things that people declare “immoral” that seem to come from disgust rather than fear or anger, I think of restrictions on sexual behavior (e.g. homosexuality, promiscuity) and drugs, which I think the law shouldn’t touch (except in forms where someone was injured nonconsensually, in which case revenge-anger comes into play). As emotions go, I think I’d distrust disgust more than the others.
I know some people with disgust reactions to bad epistemics (that are at least morally tinged, if not explicitly part of the person’s morality).
I think “disgust for in-elegance” is actually an important component on how “desire for consistency / reflectively fair rules” gets implemented in humans (at least. for the philosophers and lawmakers who set in motion the rules/culture that other people absorb via a less-opinionated “monkey see monkey do”)
I feel at least a little disgusted by people who are motivated by disgust, which I have discussed the paradoxicality of.
I recall some discussion of one paper claiming conservatives had higher disgust response, but this was in part becaused they asked questions about “what do you think about homosexuality” and not “what do you think about cutting up books” or “not recycling”, etc (I think the book-cutting up purity response isn’t quite disgust-mediated, at least for me, but it’s at least adjacent).
None of that is a strong claim about exactly how important disgust is to morality, either now or historically, but, I think there’s at least more to it than you’re alluding to.
The idea that ethical statements are anything more than “just expressions of emotion” is, to paraphrase Lucretius (EDIT: misattributed; it’s from Gibbon), “regarded by the common people as true, by the wise[1] as false, and by rulers as useful.”
Alarming and dangerous as this view may be, I’d be really surprised if literally everyone who had power (“in charge of anything important”) also lacked the self-awareness to see it.
See also: “I have drawn myself as the Chad.”
I figure you think the wise are correct. Well, then. Consider randomly selected paragraphs from Supreme Court justices’ opinions. Or consider someone saying “I’d like to throw this guy in jail, but unfortunately, the evidence we have is not admissible in court, and the judicial precedent on rules of evidence is there for a reason—it limits the potential abusiveness of the police, and that’s more important than occasionally letting a criminal off—so we have to let him go.” Is that an ethical statement? And is it “just an expression of emotion”?
For the record, in an ethical context, when I say a behavior is bad, I mean that (a) an ethical person shouldn’t do it (or at least should have an aversion to doing it—extreme circumstances might make it the best option) and (b) ethical people have license to punish it in some way, which, depending on the specifics, might range from “social disapproval” to “the force of the law”.
I think there are lots of people in power who are amoral, and this is indeed dangerous, and does indeed frequently lead to them harming people they rule over.
However, I don’t think most of them become amoral by reading emotivist philosophy or by independently coming to the conclusion that ethical statements are “just expressions of emotion”. What makes rulers frequently immoral? Some have hypothesized that there’s an evolved response to higher social status, to become more psychopathic. Some have said that being psychopathic makes people more likely to succeed at the fight to become a ruler. It’s also possible that they notice that, in their powerful position, they’re unlikely to face consequences for bad things they do, and… they either motivatedly find reasons to drop their ethical principles, or never held them in the first place.
I was being glib because you made some favorable (iyo) remark about the views of the people “in charge”.
I don’t actually think the “wise” I made up are entirely correct; that was just to make my paraphrase hew to the original quote about religion. Ethical statements are also tools for social signaling and status-seeking, which the “rulers” understand implicitly, among whom it is their primary purpose.
When I say a behavior is bad, it’s almost always merely an expression of my preferences. (I say almost to leave open the possibility that I might need to engage in social signaling sometimes.) But yes, I agree that all good people ought to share them and punish those who don’t.