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The "moralisation of sanctity is wrong" proposal

#1
C C Offline
Find something morally sickening? Take a ginger pill
https://aeon.co/ideas/find-something-mor...inger-pill

EXCERPT: . . . Until recently, no research study had been able to figure out if the disgust felt upon encountering a morally troubling situation is what makes us decide that the situation is wrong. In fact, no study had even determined whether that feeling is real – whether, when we say we are disgusted by some morally reprehensible event, we mean it literally: we feel nauseous.

This gap in scientific knowledge led my former graduate student Conor Steckler to come up with a brilliant idea. As those prone to motion sickness might know, ginger root can reduce nausea. Steckler suggested we feed people ginger pills, then ask them to weigh in on morally questionable scenarios – behaviours such as peeing in a public pool, or buying a sex doll that looks like one’s receptionist. If people’s moral beliefs are wrapped up in their bodily sensations, then giving them a pill that reduces some of those sensations [...]

In my psychology lab at the University of British Columbia, we filled empty gel capsules with either ginger powder or sugar (for randomly assigned control participants); in a double-blind design, neither the participants nor the researchers running the study knew who received which pill. [...] Sure enough, as we reported in an article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2019, we found the predicted difference. Those who ingested ginger decided that some of those violations, such as someone peeing in your swimming pool, were not so wrong after all. Blocking their nausea changed our participants’ moral beliefs.

Importantly, these effects didn’t emerge for all the moral dilemmas we presented. [...] In our studies, ginger had no effect on participants’ responses to highly severe infractions. Apparently, most people think it’s so obviously wrong to eat your own dog or sleep with a close relative that any disgust they might feel at these behaviours had no impact on their beliefs. ... In contrast, for the more ambiguous infractions – such as buying that sex doll or eating (totally clean!) faeces – people’s moral judgments were partly shaped by their disgust feelings.

We also found that ginger had no effect on people’s beliefs about other kinds of moral violations: those that involve harm to others, such as drinking and driving, or those that involve fairness, such as failing to tip a server. The violations that were affected by ginger, in contrast, centred on maintaining the purity of one’s own body. [...] According to the psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues, in many cultures this presumably adaptive tendency morphed into a broader ethic that uses concepts such as purity, sanctity and sin to discourage behaviours perceived to cause some manner of bodily degradation. In many cultures, these rules have stretched far beyond their original adaptive purposes...

[...] In fact, much of the socially proscribed moralisation of sanctity that occurs now is, itself, wrong. It is appropriate, and useful, for people to feel disgusted by spoiled foods, faeces, dead bodies and sibling sex. But that doesn’t mean that we should moralise these emotional responses. We don’t have to extend our beliefs about right and wrong to behaviours that don’t actually hurt others, even if we find them disgusting. The tendency to do so is an ancient evolutionary holdover and, with the help of modern sanitation and safe sex practices, it’s one we can afford to set aside.

Yet this kind of moralisation is manifested frequently in response to a number of behaviours that, to some, appear to tarnish the presumed purity of the human body. [...] Instead, many of us would prefer to hew to a set of moral standards that come from a coherent, rationally derived philosophy about enhancing justice and mitigating harms. Certain human behaviours do make us feel sick. But we need not rely on those feelings as a basis for our moral principles, or when judging others for what we feel to be immoral.

Before deciding that something is wrong, we might ask ourselves, is it just that I’m disgusted by it? Or, when encountering what appears to be a moral dilemma, we could play it safe and reach for a ginger ale... (MORE - details)
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#2
Magical Realist Offline
The sanctity and holiness often spoken of in the Bible seemed to originally be linked to something washed and purified. The sense of something being unholy was otoh tied to something defiled and corrupt and an abomination, which definitely suggests the emotion of disgust. I think this is where the earliest ideas of sin came from, especially as we read about it in Leviticus with all the cleansing rituals. The Judeo Christian concept of a sacrifice was as a cleansing agent to the stain of sin which one could never truly get out and remained on you forever. Someone needs to do an analysis of the whole idea of immorality and sin as an elaboration of the quality of being dirty and impure. Maybe Paul Ricoeur already did.

https://www.google.com/search?q=ricoeur+...e&ie=UTF-8
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#3
Syne Offline
None of the Ten Commandments, nor the Golden Rule, deal with any of the bodily degradation issues they cite as being linked to disgust. So at best, this may apply to Judaic law, with things like a prohibition against eating pork.
Nor does it sound like they compared the existing morals of the participants, nor even just find the effect of ginger on any existing, codified, or widely accepted moral wrongs. So ginger affected disgust reaction, but they seem to have completely failed to link that to any real, existing morality at all. Conflating the language used is a far cry from making such a connection.

Even though I often cite Haidt, here he seems to have gone out on a limb.
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#4
C C Offline
(Feb 27, 2020 04:00 AM)C C Wrote: https://aeon.co/ideas/find-something-mor...inger-pill

[...] In fact, much of the socially proscribed moralisation of sanctity that occurs now is, itself, wrong. It is appropriate, and useful, for people to feel disgusted by spoiled foods, faeces, dead bodies and sibling sex. But that doesn’t mean that we should moralise these emotional responses.


There is probably food, safety, and sanitary inspection and enforcement in any country that can afford such. The Nanny State aspects of government also continually bleat about standards for nutrition, health, protected sex, and green habits. Which is to say, we can remove the "moral rote" of cultural customs and religion from the picture and there is still institutional expertise -- along with any "cause/effect consequences" provoking those views -- asserting that eating/playing with feces and the rest of the litany of disgust is not sensible. If the administrative establishments are crusading their own _X_ brand of purity, then it's going to acquire virtuous overtones regardless of influence from older societal traditions.

As for items like incest, zoophilia. etc... This current, revived wave of suggesting that we suspend disapproval for certain practices goes back prior to and during the heyday of the sexual revolution. When all sexual taboos and guilt associated with them were being challenged -- including not only necrophilia and incest but relationships with post-pubescent minors (Allen Ginsburg was even promoting NAMBLA). As a token example, speculative fiction author Theodore Sturgeon wrote a story for Harlan Ellison's "Dangerous Visions" collection of stories (1967), titled If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?.

It's not surprising that progressives in the faddish era of "just grab any quick, handy norm and smash it against the table" were so enamored with Sturgeon's tale that it became a finalist for a Nebula Award. But in the years afterwards, especially when Daddy Issues became a regular staple of television programming, reality became too glaringly obvious.

REVIEW: To stick with the theme of the anthology, Sturgeon tackled one of the most widely spread of all human taboos: incest. There is a lot of progressive ideas in the novella. The society of the planet the main character visits is utopia. Its inhabitants are wealthy, healthy and happy. They are free to do pretty much anything they please and as a result are able to satisfy all their natural (read: sexual) needs. In the afterword Sturgeon says he aimed to take a logical argument and a conviction based on it, one step further and see if it encourages people to reconsider their conviction. Which would have been fine if Sturgeon's reasoning was not so obviously flawed.

The character doing the explaining starts of reasonable. Human misery is not caused by sex or arousal but by the guilt attached to it. The link between sex and guilt has caused more suffering than I care to think about. Sturgeon certainly has a point there. Then he takes his step beyond and pins his whole case for ultimate sexual freedom on the question whether or not incest is morally wrong. What follows is a bunch of biological half-truths and falsehoods, mixed up with some dubious psychology that must have been derived from some of Freud's more questionable theories. The effect of unequal relationships and parental authority, and the potential to abuse these is entirely ignored. Jealousy and break-ups seem to be unheard of. The whole thing is so illogical, it is bullshit almost from start to finish. And yet the main character buys it.


Yeah, as stated below, Sturgeon was using incest as an illustrative tool. But as remarked above, the main character buys into the pseudo-intellectualism and pseudoscience at the end (he originally started out horrified when realizing parents on Vexvelt were having sex with their children and other relatives). Instead of this elusive, supposed "proper truth" that Sturgeon wants us to discover about a controversial topic, he actually (unintentionally?) sanctions it being okay for us everyday idiots to be converted by motivated and cognitively biased reasoning.

World Heritage Encyclopedia: Sturgeon wrote the story with an afterword that makes it plain that incest is not the real issue here, but rather how we manufacture falsehoods and turn them into perceived "truths", by adding to and building onto something harmless to the point of creating something that is positively harmful. This story is written to illustrate Sturgeon's credo of "ask the next question". By picking a very contentious subject for promotion he prompts a common array of responses such as "because it's wrong". Sturgeon then pops the question "Why is it wrong?" and shows us how we tend to flit around an issue instead of facing the reality. The afterword makes the point that each successive answer should prompt a question that punches through it until a proper truth can be reached.

Oh, on zoophilia... A dog is being abusively manipulated by its owner or a stranger in a position of authority, just as a child would be. The animal arguably also has a greater deficit of cognition and understanding as to what's going on.
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