[00:00:01.610] - Wesley You're listening to Journal Injuries, a podcast about philosophy and cognitive science, where researchers open up about the articles they publish. I'm Wesley Buckwalter. [00:00:10.600] - Wesley In this episode, Victor Kumar talks about his paper Foul Behavior, published in Philosophers Imprint. Victor is an assistant professor of philosophy and the director of the Mind and Morality Lab at Boston University, where he studies ethics, cognitive science, and evolutionary theory. [00:00:31.440] - Wesley There are good emotions and their bad ones. On the good side. You'Ve got feelings like love and empathy on the bad side, you get hate and disgust. Or so it sometimes seems, at least, but it's discussed really a bad thing. Does it make sense to even ask this question? These are the topics of Vic's paper. In our everyday lives. We're sometimes disgusted by physical things like rotton food, germs or bugs. This is what researchers sometimes call basic disgust, but sometimes we're also disgusted by bad behavior, what researchers sometimes call moral disgust. In his paper, Victor argues that sometimes both of these things can be fitting. [00:01:14.760] - Victor A lot of philosophers have written about disgust and morality, and in recent years, moral disgust has had a bad reputation. Many people think the stuff doesn't really belong in morality. And so this paper is trying to resist that skeptical view of disgust. I basically argue that basic discuss, like discuss towards health and disease is sitting under certain conditions, and actually moral disgust is also a fitting response to moral wrong under analogous conditions. There's a question here about whether disgust is a good emotion or whether it's a good moral Compass, and I wouldn't know. [00:01:56.580] - Victor My paper is not trying to argue that discuss is a good guide. Like you should trust the wisdom of repugnance in the way that Leon Cast things. My point really is just that discuss is no worse and no better than so many other emotions, like anger and sympathy. So these emotions, they also miss fire. There's many cases where you might feel anger at someone moral anger, but it's really it's not really if they did something wrong, you're just entitled. So I'm not trying to tell people that they should rely on discuss. [00:02:33.930] - Victor I'm just saying they shouldn't dismiss it is less relevant to moral life than other emotions in general. I think that there's too much variation, both between individuals and between cultures, to draw very sweeping generalizations about the wisdom or folly of discuss like is discussed good or bad? Well, no, that's just a bad question. I mean, discuss can be good under some conditions and bad under some conditions. Sometimes when you feel discussed, maybe you're responding to something important and sometimes you're just being misled. I think that one of the complaints that I have about our field of philosophy is that I think philosophers try to generalize much more than the subject matter permits. [00:03:18.070] - Victor And so I don't think you can make these broad sweeping generalizations about discussed or any other more emotion either. I think it's important in account of discuss to understand really what at a fundamental level the emotion is. And I think there's a lot of consensus here among empirical researchers that discussed is this evolved primitive emotion that functions to motivate avoidance and exclusion of things that are sources of disease and infection. So the way that it does that discuss is through its functional role. It's not an approach emotion. [00:03:57.890] - Victor It's an avoidance emotion. When you feel discussed, you want to avoid and distance yourself from something that is disgusting. So that's what researchers generally being discussed is. And there's also a lot of agreement, too. That discussed was then, at some point in human history, co opted for morality. It just in the same way that we might want to avoid and exclude things that are sources of disease and infection. We also might want to avoid and exclude people or behaviors that are threats to us. And so discussed also was recruited to play that role as well. [00:04:33.550] - Victor People seem to think that disgust is a conservative emotion. That the times when people feel moral discussed it's in response to things that more the sorts of things that the Conservatives think are wrong than Liberals in wrong. So, you know, people feel discussed in response to things like a natural behavior, like maybe homosexuality or maybe things like cloning or genetic engineering. And I think that what might be going on in the background for some skeptics of dis fast like Kelly Erniss bum as they think. Well, this is not an emotion that's characteristic of my psychology is a Liberal. [00:05:12.790] - Victor It's the other side that feels this. So let me find some other arguments, independent arguments to show why discusses unreliable or harmful. And I actually think that it's just not really true that discuss is a conservative motion because I think Liberals feel discussed, too. I mean, for example, Conservatives might feel discussed at the thought of defiling the pure human body. But I also think that Liberals feel discussed at impurity as well. It's just different forms of impurity things like polluting the environment. If you see someone driving a Hummer, maybe if you're a Liberal, you feel disgust at this person. [00:05:53.480] - Victor But then I think there's also other things that people feel discussed towards that are totally bipartisan. They're not just their emotional reactions that are shared by Conservatives and Liberals. So, for example, people feel discussed towards dishonest politicians or people who use people who or exploit others. And yeah, so that's one way in which discussed it's another way in which disgust is not distinctively conservative. In this case, it's a bipartisan moral motion. A big question here is, what does it mean for an emotion to be fitting? [00:06:33.720] - Victor And for the most part, I really Dodge that question in the paper because I'm making this argument from analogy. I'm saying, well, if you think that basic discuss is fitting in these conditions and moral discusses fitting in analogous conditions, but it's true that fitting. This is different from other kinds of normative appraisal, like reliable or justified. And so my own view of fitting is fitting. Ness is pretty controversial. I think that an emotion is fitting is fitting response to an object that elicits it when having that emotional response to things of that general type tends to produce good consequences. [00:07:18.950] - Victor So the reason why basic disgust is a fitting response to things like rotten food or feces is because, like in general, if you have that discussed response, then that will lead you to avoid the things that are sources of disease and infection. So it's going to have good consequences generally. But that's a very controversial view of fitness. Most people don't agree that view. So my argument in the paper doesn't try to rest on it. But I do try to engage with other people who are trying to focus on different other ways of evaluating moral discuss. [00:07:53.250] - Victor So, for example, Dan Kelly in his great book isn't really thinking so much of whether discuss is fitting. He's trying to think about whether it's a reliable response, like when you feel moral discussed. Is that a reliable sign that the thing that you responding to is actually morally problematic? And so my main argument isn't about reliable Ness. But I do have arguments that respond to Kelly in that paper. So I'm arguing that. Well, actually. So one of the arguments I make is that discussed. The mechanisms that underlie discuss are so flexible that you can't directly read off the way that it currently operates from its evolutionary function. [00:08:31.010] - Victor So yeah, maybe basic discuss was to some extent unreliable, but that doesn't mean that the way that discuss operates now, especially in moral domains, is also unreliable because we flexibly attune our discuss sensitivity and our emotional responses in general, depending on our physical and social environments, in particular learning environments. One kind of skeptic argues that discusses unreliable, but another kind argues that it's hopeful that it has bad consequences. We feel discussed towards outcasts and towards the downtrodden, and so discusses just one more way of reinforcing these bad in group out group boundaries. [00:09:17.920] - Victor People feel discussed disgusted, the sort of thing that drives exclusion of homeless people or xenophobia. And I think those arguments are really powerful. Martinis bum is really the major component of these arguments. And I think she's right that that should give us pause. Ive out disgust. But my argument here is that this doesn't make discuss uniquely bad because all moral emotions have these similar kinds of dangers. I mean, anger is an emotion. It would be hard to imagine human beings as moral creatures without experiencing moral anger of some form, indignation or resentment or outrage. [00:10:03.890] - Victor And thing is, though, anger also has really high consequences. Anger can drive heat and violence and murder and genocide. And the fact that it does that doesn't mean that we should try to not feel any anger at all. We just have to be worried about the excess anger. I mean, I think that's an even true of empathy and sympathy in the way that people like Jesse Prints and Jesse prints and Paul Blue Mark that empathy can be problematic in some ways, too. I think empathy can prop up parochialism and bias where we feel more empathy and sympathy towards people who are members are in groups than group members. [00:10:42.240] - Victor So yes, disgust has negative consequences, or I can. So do all moral emotions. And I think the key is to not feel excessive discuss or excessive anger or excessively biased empathy, because disgust also has good consequences as well. And that's part of what I argue when I turn to thinking about how discuss can be fitting. So these people who are critics of discuss their what are they arguing exactly, that we shouldn't feel any discuss all or that we should just try to reduce the amount of discuss we feel, or maybe we can't reduce it, but we should just be wary of not behaving in the way that disgust ively dance to behave. [00:11:28.030] - Victor It's not ultimately clear. I do think that there are, you know, well known techniques and cognitive behavioral therapy for reducing at least the intensity of our emotional responses. One way that happens is through habituation. Right? You slowly expose yourself to a stimulus until you feel less and less of your the at least less intense emotional response to it. So could imagine that kind of analysis, something analogous to cognitive behavioral therapy being used to attenuate or discuss responses, or at least make us more conscious of acting blindly in accord with them. [00:12:15.980] - Victor But then I think, Well, if that's what you're going to do, why don't you focus specifically what you shouldn't really spoke focus so much on reducing your discussed response across the board, but specifically focusing on not looking at the cases where discuss is fitting or app like, don't worry about feeling discussed towards cheaters, and people are exploitative. Just focus on the bad cases. And of course, there are bad cases when you're feeling discussed towards people who are disfigured, for example, as an automatic response. A lot of people have it's those kinds of discuss responses that you should try to modulate, and that not try to eliminate or reduce discuss across the board. [00:12:56.340] - Victor I think it's unrealistic to ask people to reduce their discussion responses across the board because we feel discussed in so many different ways. And I'm not sure what kinds of techniques you could use to make that happen. But I also think so. It's not feasible, but it's also not wise either, because I think there's many cases where we ought to continue feeling discussed. I mean, I think it's one of the accomplishments of 21st century feminism that we feel more discussed towards people like Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump for saying sexist things. [00:13:33.100] - Victor And it's like, no, it would be a bad thing. It would have this bad side effect that we wouldn't feel as much discussed towards the people and the behaviors that really deserve it. So moral disgust has pros and cons like everything else. But it can be a fitting attitude. And the way that I argue for this is by making an argument from analogy. And I begin with begin early on in the paper trying to explain when basic discuss is fitting. So basic discuss is fitting when it's evoked by sources of disease or infection because discuss motivates withdrawal, it's also empathically transmitted to others. [00:14:15.690] - Victor Communicate the expression of discuss communicate to others that something is worth avoiding and withdrawing from. Also discuss contract the spread of disease and infection as one contaminated object touches another. And so my argument is that moral discuss is fitting under very similar conditions, though it's when the electors in particular it's when the elicits are what I call reciprocity violations. So that is, when someone is engaging in things like cheating, exploitation, or dishonesty, then it's an apt response to withdraw from them to empathically transmit your moral disgust others so that they're disgusted by this person too, and to track the spread of their behavior as other people. [00:15:05.240] - Victor You know, when some people are violating norms, other people tend to violate them as well. So basically the idea is that, well, basic discuss is fitting when it protects the body from being polluted by disease and infection, and moral discusses fitting track when it protects our social body, our communities from being contaminated by people who so mistrust and to capitalize on the trust that we have for each other. I definitely don't want to be arguing that just because something evolved makes it good. I think there's lots of things that have evolved that aren't good for us, aren't good for other people. [00:15:51.690] - Victor Like we have probably evolved some flexible tendency towards xenophobia and domination, and that does make those things good. But I don't think you can kind of you build your moral system from scratch. And both biological and cultural evolution have done a lot of work in building our moral systems, and it would be they're kind of in many ways, but not always. Evolution is smarter than us and contract things that individuals can figure out on their own. So I think that evolution can be a clue to things that are valuable. [00:16:30.300] - Victor And, you know, nature's purposes are not necessarily ours. We don't care about fitness, we care, we have other ends, but sometimes our purposes and nature's purposes align. So evolution, in this case, has produced a capacity for disgust that has certain consequences that increased our fitness. But those consequences also matter to us that we care about. That because we want to be free of disease infection we want to be. We want to exclude people who are disrupting our communities and sewing distrust. So when the mechanisms that evolution produces are conducive to goals that we share, then we we can figure out how to best design our communities by thinking about how they've been designed by evolution. [00:17:26.430] - Victor My argument is that there's an analogy between basic discuss and moral discuss, and you might think, well, there's actually an important dis analogy here, which is that it's fine to feel disgusted at food, that even if it's okay, but it's not okay to feel morally disgusted by people even when they've done nothing wrong. So I do feel the force of that criticism, but I think it really all depends on what the kind of background rates of moral violations. And that really depends on the context. So, for example, like one type of person who elicits fitting moral disgust is like a person generally a man who sexually exploits people in subordinate positions. [00:18:16.150] - Victor And I think the problem here, at least in our society, is that too many such exploitative people are getting away with it. So I think that maybe our moral disgust sensitivity in that domain is under sensitive rather than over sensitive, or we're not feeling enough moral discuss towards people. So I think it really depends, like, maybe you want to in some cases, give people the benefit of the doubt. But I think when people too many people have been benefiting from doubt, then those are cases where you perhaps want to ramp up your sensitivity disgust towards people. [00:18:56.280] - Victor In the last section of the paper, I talked about the way in which discusses useful or harmful in politics. And again, my general view here is not like discuss is good. It's like let's try to figure out the ways that discuss is good and the way that it's bad. And I do think that discuss has this really important communicative function. It can. It's an effective way of commuting to other people our values and sharing them with people and creating solidarity. But I think increasingly, in the last few years, I've been have been more persuaded by the dangers of disgust in political life. [00:19:36.120] - Victor I mean, I think that discussed is probably one among many factors that drive polarization as people are disgusted by out group members, and increasingly that means people from the other political party or even people who are Liberal like you are conservative like you, but not quite in the same sub group as you. So I kind of worry that maybe at least in recent years. On balance, discuss has been a negative force in reducing solidarity because of the way in which at least in America, politics has become so much more fragmented and people are really hiding themselves often smaller and smaller groups and feeling discussed content for anyone that doesn't subscribe to precisely their set of values. [00:20:31.010] - Victor So I think I think it's a very hard question, but I think that it's likely that there needs to be more cooperation and solidarity between political tribes right now. And I don't think discuss helps with that. There's been a lot of fascinating research on discuss, and I think that more research is needed. So one thing that I think that is more conceptual. I think there needs to be more work on really what moral discussed is and what distinguishes moral discuss from more basic discuss. Mara Ballard has a nice paper on this, but I don't think it settles the question. [00:21:13.820] - Victor I'd like to see more on that. I'd also like to see more empirical research on exploring particular domains in which people feel moral discussed. Like, I think there's lots of different domains where people feel more discussed. It's not just purity violations. It's also, as I argue in the paper, quote, unquote reciprocity violations, cases of cheating, dishonesty and exploitation. There's also much more specific things that have to do with, like, sex and sexual exploitation. So I'd love to see more focused empirical research that doesn't just look at that tries to not just give people questionnaires, but tries to develop more sophisticated techniques for understanding how people actually feel discussed in their lives in particular domains and context. [00:22:08.470] - Victor What I'm trying to do is figure out how discussed work, like what is the psychological tool that we have of moral disgust? And how can we use this tool in good ways? And how can we avoid using in bad ways? I think people like Martha is, UM, are absolutely right. That discusses a tool that can lead us astray it can lead us to exclude subordinate people who are already marginalized. But I think discuss is a powerful tool as well that allows us to punish and contain people who disrupt the trust that is part of our social fabric. [00:22:43.360] - Victor I just written a new book with Richmond Campbell called A Better It, and that book is trying to do a similar kind of thing. It's trying to look at our evolved moral psychology. How did our moral minds evolve through biological and cultural evolution? What are the tools that we are left with after millennia, in fact, millions of years of evolution? What kind of moral capacities do we have and how can we use them for good and avoid using them for bad? So, for example, Campbell and I think that a key part of the moral mind is the way in which our moral emotions are integrated with more cognitive reasoning processes. [00:23:30.040] - Victor And we think that that in certain kinds of social context, our moral reasoning can shape our emotions in ways that make them more sensitive to the needs of others that make ourselves more sensitive to injustice and unfairness. And the book in general is looking at the tools that we have as a result of our evolved moral psychology and trying to understand better how to use those tools in ways that can make our societies better and more inclusive and more egalitarian. [00:24:14.540] - Speaker 3 That's it for today's episode. [00:24:16.110] - Wesley Funding, in part was provided by the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at George Mason University. Visit our website at Journal entries. [00:24:23.500] - Speaker 3 Fireside FM for more information about Vic Kumar. [00:24:26.580] - Wesley His work and some of the resources mentioned on this episode.