‘Disgusting’ and similar words are flung across political divides quite often today. For example, the US president Donald Trump has used the word to describe his political opponents, journalists and others. And many have voiced disgust at the president’s own behaviours. For instance, after viewing Trump’s altercation with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a press conference in 2025, the author David Brooks described feeling ‘nauseated, just nauseated’. In politics and beyond, expressing disgust is a common response to actions that one finds deeply objectionable, such as racist rhetoric, acts of sexual abuse or policies that harm vulnerable people.
Rather than see expressions like these as merely rhetorical, many philosophers and psychologists argue that moral disgust is a distinct and significant kind of moral response. The distinction between moral disgust and regular disgust lies in the way their objects are experienced by the disgusted person. People feel regular disgust in response to the spread of filth, which motivates physical avoidance and cleansing. The stench of urine on a train, for example, provokes this kind of disgust. When people feel moral disgust, it’s as if they are experiencing a sort of moral pollution, which motivates them to socially avoid and exclude the target of the disgust. Betrayal and exploitation, for example, often provoke moral disgust, but not regular disgust.
Many scholars believe that disgust operates based on simplistic and unreliable heuristics. For example, in his book Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust (2011), the philosopher Daniel Kelly argues that disgust is an evolutionarily old mechanism that protected humans from poisons and parasites – and so it operates on a ‘hair trigger’ that is prone to generate false positives. Kelly thinks that, since moral disgust grew out of regular disgust, it is similarly unreliable when it comes to moral matters. Just as you can find some physical thing disgusting (say, a certain kind of cheese) when it’s actually harmless, you might automatically find some behaviours morally disgusting that, on reflection, aren’t so bad.
Now, some of Kelly’s premises can be challenged: there is evidence that our emotional systems are intelligent and adaptable. Rather than just recapitulating ancient functions, our emotions contain updating mechanisms that enable them to respond to new physical and social challenges. Furthermore, even regular disgust is flexible and remarkably sensitive to context. For example, whether you find saliva disgusting depends a lot on whether it comes from your lover or a total stranger.
Some have argued that, far from being unreliable, moral disgust plays an invaluable role in moral judgment. In Leon Kass’s classic essay ‘The Wisdom of Repugnance’ (1997), he claims that people’s disgust towards human cloning gives us some reason to avoid that practice, warning us ‘not to transgress what is unspeakably profound’. In this decadent age, Kass says, ‘repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity.’
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