Arrested Development and Philosophy_ They've Made a Huge Mistake - Kristopher G. Phillips [14]
The Yuck Factor, and the Wisdom of Repugnance
Among human beings, there’s almost a universal response to incest: Eeww! Gross! Yuck! Might this visceral response tell us something about what’s morally right?
There’s no formal argument behind this reasoning. But there is nonetheless something philosophically intriguing here. The philosopher A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) argued that moral claims don’t actually mean what we think they mean. Ayer’s position, called emotivism, is that moral claims simply express our emotional response to a particular action or state of affairs. Saying, “It is morally wrong for George Sr. to steal from his shareholders,” is nothing more than an expression of disgust for George Sr.’s actions. There is no way to logically prove that stealing from shareholder is wrong; all we have is our emotional reaction.
The near-universal Yuck! response to incest may be an example of emotivism. George Michael and Maeby may not be on the edge of doing something that is morally wrong; it may be that hooking up while everyone believes them to be biologically related is merely the type of action that would result in a response of “Yuck!” But so what? “Yuck!” is not a philosophical argument; it doesn’t prove a thing about morality. The emotivist tells us that moral claims are personal reports of deep admiration or disgust, nothing more.
Contrary to Ayer, Leon Kass offers a defense of the yuck factor as a means of telling us what is morally right and wrong, what he calls the wisdom of repugnance. Kass presented a lengthy and impassioned essay against human cloning in 1997 (when a sheep named Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned). One of Kass’s objections is that we all recognize that some aspects of cloning humans are simply offensive or grotesque. Imagine women giving birth to offspring who are genetically identical to themselves (are they giving birth to themselves?), or giving birth to individuals genetically identical to their own mothers or fathers (can I be my mother’s mother?), or parents attempting to create genetically identical children to “replace” those who have died. Kass considers what this visceral response might tell us:
Revulsion is not an argument; and some of yesterday’s repugnanaces are today calmly accepted—though, one must add, not always for the better. In crucial cases, however, repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it. Can anyone really give an argument fully adequate to the horror which is father-daughter incest (even with consent), or having sex with animals, or mutilating a corpse, or eating human flesh, or even just (just!) raping or murdering another human being? Would anyone’s failure to give full rational justification for his or her revulsion at these practices make that revulsion ethically suspect? Not at all. On the contrary, we are suspicious of those who think that they can rationalize away our horror, say, by trying to explain the enormity of incest with arguments only about the genetic risks of inbreeding.1
According to Kass, there is wisdom in repugnance. The fact that we find something deeply repugnant, gross, or yucky might be reason for us to pause, to consider the enormity of our action, and to recognize its moral wrongness. This isn’t a formal argument, akin to the Argument from Naturalism. It is, however, a reason that George Michael and Maeby might think twice.
Let’s think about the yuck factor and the wisdom of repugnance. Do they offer the moral guidance George Michael isn’t getting? Probably not. But there is a more significant philosophical problem here. It has to do with the kind of normative evaluation that we undertake when we say that an action is morally wrong. Normative ethics is the study of what is morally right or wrong, good or bad. But there are many types of normative