Abstract
The life-in-death theory makes empirical claims, and is therefore subject to empirical verification. Even if this theory were purely analytic or phenomenological, it would be accountable to countervailing empirical evidence. If we cannot use empirical evidence to support or refute this theory, then it cannot be compared with competing theories, which defer to observable reality.
Keywords
McGinn (2011, 2015) does not simply offer a theory about the meaning and phenomenology of disgust. The life-in-death theory proposes that disgust evolved to shield our caveman ancestors from the psychological trauma of coprophagy and necrophilia, for which early humans developed a liberal appetite. This historical impetus supposedly explains the range of stimuli that repulse us today: corpses, feces, open wounds, and any object where life and death comingle. These are falsifiable, empirical claims, and they are foundational for McGinn’s theory.
The observation that disgust is highly complex, elicited by many types of stimuli, and incapable of collapsing neatly within a single functional framework is a common refrain amongst disgust scholars (for various accounts see Kelly, 2011; Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 2010; Strohminger, 2014a, 2014b; Tybur, Lieberman, Kurzban, & DeScioli, 2013). Nonetheless, any theory would be remiss not to acknowledge, or contend with, the central role that pathogens play in disgust. McGinn disregards this evidence, arguing instead that universal disgust elicitors are unrelated to disease avoidance or physical harm. These are extraordinary claims, and they require extraordinary evidence, evidence that the author does not supply.
Disgust’s phenomenology and its function are separate questions, but they are relevant to one another. For instance, the reason that fear and disgust are experienced differently has to do with the respective problems each emotion is designed to solve. We’re disgusted by pathogens and not afraid of them because we don’t need to flee or fight them, but avoid contact with and expel them. A bacterium does not attack us the same way as a bear. The experience of disgust—the nausea and skin crawling, the sensation of uncleanness, the urge to wash or spit out—is well suited to this goal. Any inquiry into how disgust feels is bound to be contingent upon, and tied up with, its evolutionary history and psychological mechanism.
We should be careful what we wish for. Were we to treat McGinn’s theory as impervious to data, as he asserts it should be, this also renders his view irrelevant to other theories of disgust. McGinn argues that his theory is superior to all others—pathogen avoidance, taste-toxicity, animal reminder—but these are theories grounded in empirical evidence. By banishing itself to an orthogonal universe, the life-in-death theory consigns itself to a pale, limited sort of existence: untouched by the dirty hands of reality, of no consequence to those theories it wishes to consider itself superior to, and eventually forgotten.