Author Topic: Does morality spring more from disgust than from cultural beliefs?  (Read 3026 times)

Joe Carillo

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Since time immemorial, there have been two prevailing beliefs about morality or the sense of right and wrong. The first is, of course, that morality is the word of God, and the second, that morality is a set of rules to be worked out by human reasoning.

But in “The surprising moral force of disgust,” an article that appears in the August 15, 2010 issue of The Boston Globe, staff writer Drake Bennett reports that some behavioral scientists now entertain the idea that a significant part of morality can be explained by our innate feelings of disgust. He based this report on the growing number of studies that appear to show that disgust has the power to shape our moral judgments.

“Disgust was probably the most underappreciated moral emotion, the most unstudied one,” Bennett’s report quotes Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, as saying. “It’s become politically much more relevant since the culture wars of the 1990s, and so within the broader renaissance of moral psychology disgust has been a particularly hot topic.”

Haidt and other psychologists are at the forefront of research into the so-called moral emotions—disgust, anger, and compassion—and the role these emotions play in how societies form moral codes and apply them in daily life. A few, like Haidt himself, have gone so far as to claim that “all the world’s moral systems can best be characterized not by what their adherents believe, but what emotions they rely on,” but Bennett says this claim has been met with deep skepticism in psychology circles.

Read Drake Bennett’s “The surprising moral force of disgust” in The Boston Globe now!

ANOTHER SUGGESTED READING:
In “Step 1: Post Elusive Proof. Step 2: Watch Fireworks,” an article that appears in the August 16, 2010 issue of The New York Times, John Markoff reports on the Internet’s great potential for fostering collaboration in proving or disproving controversial proofs to phenomenally tough mathematical problems. He says that this was shown recently when complexity theorists took recourse to blogs and wikis to cross-check and debunk a claimed proof for the “P versus NP” problem, a most difficult puzzle that have continued to stump mathematicians and computer scientists.

Read John Markoff’s “Step 1: Post Elusive Proof. Step 2: Watch Fireworks” in The New York Times now!

« Last Edit: September 05, 2010, 11:27:07 PM by Joe Carillo »