Disgust, Moral Disgust, and Morality * Joshua Gert “Disgust, Moral Disgust, and Morality,” The Journal of Moral Philosophy, forthcoming. Please cite published version when available. ABSTRACT: This paper calls into question the idea that moral disgust is usefully regarded as a form of genuine disgust. This hypothesis is questionable even if, as some have argued, the spread of moral norms through a community makes use of signaling mechanisms that are central to core disgust. The signaling system is just one part of disgust, and may well be completely separable from it. Moreover, there is plausibly a significant difference between the cognitive scientist’s concept of an emotion and the everyday notion of that emotion. Finally, even if, as this paper contests, some form of disgust were directly elicited by the moral wrongness of certain kinds of behavior, research on the socio-moral elicitors of the disgust mechanism would still be unlikely to shed much direct light on the nature or content of morality. KEYWORDS: Disgust, Moral Disgust, Morality, Emotion Introduction Interest in the connection between morality and disgust now spans a number of disciplines. Psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Paul Rozin, Laura Lowery and Sumio Imada have hypothesized that disgust underlies one of three modes of morality – a morality of purity or sanctity that has little to do with harms and benefits or with social cooperation. 1 Bioethicist and biochemist Leon Kass and philosopher Michael Hauskeller have each claimed that disgust at a certain sort of practice – for example, cloning – provides us with an important clue that the practice is morally problematic, even if we cannot precisely pinpoint the problematic aspect. 2