This is a special post for quick takes by jimrandomh. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
This post is a container for my short-form writing. See this post for meta-level discussion about shortform.
A news article reports on a crime. In the replies, one person calls the crime "awful", one person calls it "evil", and one person calls it "disgusting".
I think that, on average, the person who called it "disgusting" is a worse person than the other two. While I think there are many people using it unreflectively as a generic word for "bad", I think many people are honestly signaling that they had a disgust reaction, and that this was the deciding element of their response. But disgust-emotion is less correlated with morality than other ways of evaluating things.
The correlation gets stronger if we shift from talk about actions to talk about people, and stronger again if we shift from talk about people to talk about groups.
I agree "unsatisfactory" is different from disgust. I think people vary in which emotions end up loadbearing for them.
I know rationalists who feel disgust reactions to people who have unclean "epistemic hygiene", or who knowingly let themselves into situations where their epistemics will be reliably fucked.
For that matter, in the OP, some people are responding to regular ol' criminal morality with disgust, and while you (or Jim, or in fact, me) can say "man I really don't trust people who run their morality off disgust", it doesn't necessarily follow that it'd, for example, work well if you simply removed disgust from the equation for everyone – it might turn out to be loadbearing to how society is function.
I'm not sure if we disagree about a particular thing here, because, like, it's not like you're exactly proposing to snap your fingers and eliminate disgust from human morality unilaterally (but it sounds like you might be encouraging people to silence/ignore their disgust reactions, without tracking that this may be important for how some significant fraction of people are currently tracking morality, in a way that would destroy a lot of important information and coordination mechanism if you didn't more thoughtfully replace it with other things)
I agree high reflectivity people probably have less disgust-oriented morality (because yeah, disgust-morality is often not well thought out or coherent), but I just have a general precautionary principle against throwing out emotional information.
I, uh, maybe want to summon @divia who might have more specific thoughts here.
Yeah, that's not what I'm suggesting. I think the thing I want to encourage is basically just to be more reflective on the margin of disgust-based reactions (when it concerns other people). I agree it would be bad to throw it out unilaterally, and probably not a good idea for most people to silence or ignore it. At the same time, I think it's good to treat appeals to disgust with suspicion in moral debates (which was the main point I was trying to make) (especially since disgust in particular seems to be a more "contagious" emotion for reasons that make se... (read more)
I meant wrong in the sense of universal human morality (to the extent that's a coherent thing). But yes, on an individual level your values are just your values.
This post is a container for my short-form writing. See this post for meta-level discussion about shortform.