Daniel Kelly > Quotes

“Finally, the qualitative component of the disgust affect program is a particular feeling of aversion, the all-too-familiar experience of revulsion and repulsion. From a subjective point of view, feelings of disgust can vary in intensity and texture from instance to instance, and more intense episodes are phenomenologically similar to nausea. In fact, this is no accident, as the disgust response includes many physiological concomitants of nausea (Ekman 1992). The connection between the digestive system and the affect program of disgust suggested by the previously mentioned increase in salivation that accompanies disgust, together with these similarities with nausea, has been further elucidated with brain imaging techniques. Evidence gathered using fMRI technology links disgust to the anterior insular cortex, which is thought to be involved in gustatory responses on independent grounds (Phillips et al. 1997). Indeed, the anterior insula is often called the “gustatory cortex” and is active in processing offensive tastes in both humans and other primates (Kinomura et al. 1994; Rolls and Baylis1994). This connection to the gustatory cortex also marks disgust as having a neural substrate distinct from other affect programs like fear and anger, which are more closely associated with amygdala.”
― Daniel Kelly, Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust

“Think of the most egregious rhetoric of your least favorite public figure or political commentator, and you can probably induce a quick flash of revulsion in yourself without much effort. George Orwell infamously claimed that the bourgeois think that “the lower classes smell”; he was implying that for all the highfalutin debate and reasoning about political theory, one of the most difficult hurdles to achieving real social equality is that the middle and upper classes are slightly disgusted by the working classes. The upshot is that in addition to its focus on the slime and filth of the physical world, disgust involves itself in more abstract matters as well. When it comes to rival groups or political opponents, actual odor is usually not the source of the offense, however. Rather, it is the very ideology and value system of those whom one is set against that can come to be deeply disgusting. In these cases, it is not unusual for disgust to take on a moral valence.”
― Daniel Kelly, Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust

“More significantly, in normal mature humans, disgust recognition is also often empathic. Not only are people able to naturally recognize a gape as an expression of disgust, but doing so often involves the extra step of actually becoming disgusted oneself. This is striking. Not only is recognition of disgust automatic, but the processes involved automatically put the recognizer into a similar mental state as the person being observed. In essence, disgust recognition involves a form of mental-state imitation.”
― Daniel Kelly, Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust

“Rozin also speculates that new elicitors can be acquired more circuitously with the help of language, as when one is swayed by passionate testimony or convinced by rational argumentation of the immorality or disgustingness of a practice such as eating meat or smoking (Rozin 1997). Fessler et al. (2003) lend some indirect empirical support to this speculation when they conclude, based on a Web-based self-report survey of nearly one thousand adults, that “moral vegetarians’ disgust reactions to meat are caused by, rather than the cause of, their moral beliefs.” In other words, in many cases of moral vegetarianism, something other than an antecedent revulsion to meat—perhaps propositional reasoning or effective rhetoric—is instrumental in becoming disgusted by meat.”
― Daniel Kelly, Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust

“According to Shweder and his colleagues (1997), purity norms can govern a range of issues, including what foods can be eaten, who is fit and unfit to prepare them, and how foods must be cleaned or treated before they can be eaten. Purity norms also address the specifics of which sexual activities are permissible and what is forbidden, deviant, or “dirty”; allowable and inappropriate sleeping arrangements involving the members of nuclear and extended families; what sorts of clothes can and cannot be worn at different times or in specific places and settings, especially in temples and other sacred locations, or during religious rituals; how a range of organic matter, such as corpses, blood, feces, and so on, should properly be dealt with to avoid the risk of pollution; and which other social groups one can interact with, as well as how and when it is permissible to interact with them, and how to avoid becoming tainted by members of “lower” groups. The subject matter of the issues governed by such norms shows a fairly clear affinity with the subject matter regulated by disgust, and the defining contrast between purity, on the one hand, and dirt and contamination, on the other, further implicates the emotion. The Co-opt thesis holds that disgust will provide the motivation for individuals to comply with purity norms that they have acquired, and that disgust also shapes the punitive motivations that are directed at violators. Initial experimental evidence has begun to flesh out this picture in more detail (Rozin et al. 1999).”
― Daniel Kelly, Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust

“One interesting fact about disgust is that it is a piece of human psychology that does not sit easily on either side of the traditional nature–nurture divide. On the one hand, the capacity to be disgusted, together with a small set of things that appear to be universally and innately disgusting, is a part of the species’ typical psychological endowment. These are a part of human nature; one does not have to learn how to be disgusted, and one does not have to be taught to be disgusted by certain things, either—like the pungent smell of rotting garbage on a hot summer day, for instance. On the other hand, the variation evident in what different people find disgusting reveals a considerable role for nurture as well. In other cases, people do learn what to be disgusted by through individual experience, through social interactions with others, and through the type of education that constitutes the refinement of their moral and aesthetic sensibilities.”
― Daniel Kelly, Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust