Outrage versus Disgust

[phantom power]

Although this isn't exactly a science article, its subject is a sort of scientific hypothesis. Is our sense of morality, and moral outrage, an evolutionary hack on top of disgust? And does that cause us to get morally upset about the wrong things?

It is indeed fascinating how people are stuck in moral outrage mode over Suleman, when it seems to me the proper response is compassion for her not even remotely hidden mental health issues that her poor family can’t cope with. But it does draw up something I’ve thought about a lot, which is how our moral responses are conflated with feelings of disgust, and indeed many people have a lot of trouble telling the difference from feeling disgusted with something and feeling morally outraged about it.

Because I’m not outraged at Suleman having a gross, unnatural belly that is made all the more disturbing her her extensive plastic surgery that gives her a face that falls straight into the uncanny valley. But I won’t lie---I flinched and was disgusted. I suppose I should be ashamed of that, but the more I think about it, the more I think that the shame at being disgusted is due to the widespread confusion of “moral outrage” and “disgust”. People think you’re laying moral judgment on something if you find it disgusting. Like if I saw a bloody tampon laying on the sidewalk and felt disgust, does that really have to mean that I’ve got internalized misogyny against women and our body functions? No. It’s just gross. Nor did my flinching at those pictures means that I think Suleman is a bad person. I think she’s messed up, and needs help, but certainly not an evil person. It’s a real shame that the circus around her means that she probably won’t get the help she needs. Everyone’s too busy being outraged.

But the fact that people confuse the two emotions---moral outrage and disgust---is fascinating. And it seems like it’s an accident of evolution, actually. Morality had to evolve out of pre-existing emotions, I suspect, and instead of piggybacking on anger or grief, moral outrage appears to have evolved out of disgust. Last night I was walking down the street and walked by a woman whose dog was shitting on the sidewalk, and when she quite responsibly picked up the poop, I smelled it and my face wrinkled up into the disgust expression involuntarily, and she looked at me, and I felt bad, because for a moment, I worried she thought I was disapproving of her when in fact I appreciated that she cleaned up after her dog. Moral outrage looks like disgust and vice versa. In fact, feeling one or the other can trigger the other feeling, which is why I suspect people look at the incredibly sad photos of Suleman doing her thing and feel moral outrage, outrage that is piggybacking on disgust, which is a tad more understandable.

(...)

Maybe if moral outrage was more related to anger or grief, we would be better. Maybe then we would get more upset over violence than sex, less worried about how our neighbors use their bodies differently than we do and more worried about if our neighbors are needlessly hurting each other. We wouldn’t get bent out of shape over abortion, and maybe “pro-lifers” could care about lives that are and not just those that could be. And certainly there’d be a lot less outrage over Suleman’s behavior and more outrage about a society that fucks so many women up, and not just her.

http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/outraged_or_just_disgusted/

[Tangerine LaBamba]

1. The writer lost me

at the first sentence.

Anyone who has an idea of what "the proper response should be" about anything is already operating within a very narrow confine, and, consequently, is of little interest to me. The writer apparently knows how people should react to something.

I'll leave it there, in every possible way.