Daniel Kelly

“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