People can be disgusted by the concrete and by the abstract--by an object                  they find physically repellent or by an ideology or value system they find morally                  abhorrent. Different things will disgust different people, depending on individual                  sensibilities or cultural backgrounds. In Yuck!, Daniel Kelly investigates the                  character and evolution of disgust, with an emphasis on understanding the role this                  emotion has come to play in our social and moral lives. Disgust has recently been                  riding a swell of scholarly attention, especially from those in the cognitive                  sciences and those in the humanities in the midst of the "affective turn."                  Kelly surveys the empirical literature and experimental results relevant to disgust                  and proposes a cognitive model that can accommodate what we now know about it. He                  offers a new account of the evolution of disgust that builds on the model and argues                  that expressions of disgust are part of a sophisticated but largely automatic                  signaling system that humans use to transmit information about what to avoid in the                  local environment. Drawing on gene culture coevolutionary theory, Kelly argues that                  disgust was co-opted to play certain roles in our moral psychology. He shows that                  many of the puzzling features of moral repugnance tinged with disgust are                  by-products of the imperfect fit between a cognitive system that evolved to protect                  against poisons and parasites and the social and moral issues on which it has been                  brought to bear. Kelly's account of this emotion provides a powerful argument                  against invoking disgust in the service of moral justification.

Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust PDF

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