An exploration of the character and evolution of disgust and the role this emotionplays in our social and moral lives.
People can be disgusted by the concrete and by the abstract -- by an object they findphysically repellent or by an ideology or value system they find morally abhorrent. Different thingswill disgust different people, depending on individual sensibilities or cultural backgrounds. InYuck!, Daniel Kelly investigates the character and evolution of disgust, with anemphasis on understanding the role this emotion has come to play in our social and moral lives.Disgust has recently been riding a swell of scholarly attention, especially from those in thecognitive sciences and those in the humanities in the midst of the "affective turn." Kellyproposes a cognitive model that can accommodate what we now know about disgust. He offers a newaccount of the evolution of disgust that builds on the model and argues that expressions of disgustare part of a sophisticated but largely automatic signaling system that humans use to transmitinformation about what to avoid in the local environment. He shows that many of the puzzlingfeatures of moral repugnance tinged with disgust are by-products of the imperfect fit between acognitive system that evolved to protect against poisons and parasites and the social and moralissues on which it has been brought to bear. Kelly's account of this emotion provides a powerfulargument against invoking disgust in the service of moral justification.
