Abstract
I use a number of McGinn’s (2011) ideas to identify likely confounds in the induction of incidental disgust as the basis of the moral amplification effect.
In a relatively early review of The Meaning of Disgust (McGinn, 2011), Ian Marcus Corbin described it as “twenty-five or so sharp, illuminating pages” scattered among 200 pages of “bizarre, tossed-off piffle” (Corbin, 2012). Strohminger (2014) does a smashingly good job of eviscerating the piffle. In what follows, I will attempt to make use of some of the twenty-five-or-so pages that illuminate.
McGinn (2011) is at some of his most illuminating when he speaks about disgust’s intertwining realities of the aesthetic and the moral (pp. 34–35): the same stimulus configuration may engender both the “aesthetic” recoil of disgust and (independently) an “attitude” of moral disapprobation. McGinn’s main concern here lies with acts of “sexual deviance,” but he would be unlikely to deny that the same “mixed” phenomenology marks more routine lapses of etiquette and “derelictions of duty,” for example, breaking wind at the dining table (see p. 207), or failing to clean up (p. 222).
These are not the cases that McGinn is most intrigued by, but these are the ones that make some of his points surprisingly relevant to the burgeoning literature on the moral consequents of incidental disgust (ID). Its central claim is that a “morally irrelevant” bout of ID (means of induction ranging from a novelty fart spray to a foul-tasting beverage) can (a) amplify the severity of extant moral disapproval (call it the moral amplification effect [MAE]) and (b) even engender one from scratch (Pizarro, Inbar, & Helion, 2011). McGinn (2011, pp. 34–35) comes close to offering direct evidence against the latter, but his musings are also relevant for deconstructing the former.
Consider, again, the plight of some hapless sophomore countenancing the onslaught of a novelty fart spray. Her ordeal is a veritable montage of the aesthetic and the moral. The aesthetic/visceral side is plain enough. The “moral”/normative side has (in principle) two separable components (see Figure 1), the observation that a social norm has been breached (someone did not hold in!) and a related (but separable) perception that one has been made to “suffer” a result of someone else’s actions (see McGinn, 2011, p. 202, and forward on the general obligation not to disgust and p. 7 on disgust as a hurt).
Tentative process model of the moral amplification effect (see Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012, for the discussion of the agent–patient framework).
It strikes me as altogether plausible that each of the aforementioned elements can independently generate a harsher normative outlook (be it a lab or “in the wild”), with the feeling per se being, possibly, the least generative of all.
Backing this conjecture are several recent studies configured to keep the normative elements at bay (e.g., Case, Oaten, & Stevenson, 2012; Royzman, Baron, & Goodwin, 2014; see also David & Olatunji, 2011). Collectively, they found no trace of MAE, even while using highly potent, face-valid disgust elicitors (ranging from standardized images [Case et al., 2012] to a medical poop chart [Royzman et al., 2014]) and all reporting successful manipulation checks. There are also companion results (e.g., Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan, 2008, Study 2): disgust inductions (e.g., being assigned to a filthy work environment) yielding MAE in the absence of any discernable increase in the disgust itself. Taken together, these findings indicate a double dissociation between disgust and amplification, making it almost certain that MAE will ultimately turn out to be far less about “the power of feeling” and far more about the power of subtle normative primes.
And there is one more ultimate worry that McGinn would be exceedingly likely to endorse: even assuming that votaries of MAE were triumphantly successful in tickling their subjects’ affective sensibilities in some moral load-free manner or went as far as to imbue them (say, via pharmacologically induced nausea 1 ) with visceral disgust directly, the final theoretical payoff would be very modest indeed, signifying nothing as dramatic as the triumph of feeling over reason, but only that (reasonably enough) people use affect as one of many inputs to a normative judgment process 2 .