99.44 % (Morally) Pure.
I would love to hear what Old Testament /Hebrew Bible scholars make of this. . . .
is there a psychological connection between perception of physical cleanliness and commitment to moral cleanliness?
The moral issues they discussed could each be argued to involve a certain amount of pollution –smoking, illegal drug use, pornography, profane language, littering and adultery. In one of the best books I’ve ever read, Joel Feinberg’s Offending Others, he argues that there is a distinct class of judgments called “charientic judgments” that get at an “ick factor” produced by, say, bodily fluids, small squishy bugs, every single episode of CSI, etc. One wonders whether, although these are moral issues, the target study group was more concentrated on their charientic aspect.
I wonder whether there is a connection with moral issues that don’t have that a charientic connotation, such as theft, or embezzlement, etc.
HT Daily Dish
“… every single episode of CSI…”
Dr. K, you make me laugh again.
I googled “charientic judgement” and saw there was Peter Glassen writing about it long before Joel Feinberg.
A fine book I once read is _The Anatomy of Disgust_ by William Ian Miller, a law prof like yourself. He thinks disgust is a protection for the person feeling it but may contribute to our contempt for another person or group of people.
A review is “Anatomy of Disgust in Criminal Law”. It’s both welcoming and critical of the book:
http://www.culturalcognition.net/storage/disgust1.pdf
This link too:
http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/disgustscale.html
Theological notes, as they were called, indicated the nature of the censure that should be assigned a duscreduted proposition; the most serious of them was “heretical”; much less serious was “piis auribus offensiva, offensive to pious ears. Notice that the ears had to be pious in order to discern the offensiveness. We seminarians, when we observed a fellow much more inclined to piety than the generality of us, would refer to him as “pious to offensive ears.”
Historyman, that’s interesting. I am not sure whether disgust is learned or inborn. I’ve seen two year olds fascinated by muck in the yard I consider disgusting.
Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger is good on this too.
Joe, that’s actually priceless. I think the two should be titles of matching blogs.
Wait a minute! Are you implying that we are not?
Johnathan Haidt is a moral psychologist at UVA. He has done a lot of research about the relationship between disgust and morality, as well as politics and religionl. Here is his home page. It includes a short bibliography.
http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/home.html
Of course, the waters of baptism come to mind.
I wonder if this gets to why the question of how to dress for church seems to exercise people out of all proportion to its seeming importance. The notion that we’re well-scrubbed and in clean and pressed duds when we gather to worship is something that a lot of people are willing to go to the mat for.
In preparation for ordination, our class spiritual director made a huge point of instructing us – he went on and on about it – to make sure our fingernails were trimmed and clean. At one point in the ceremony, we place our hands in the bishop’s. Apparently in a preceding ordination class, there was one particular guy who had a lot of grime under his fingernails – a lot of deacons work with their hands – and the cardinal (may not have been the current one) had an “ick” reaction potent enough to mention it to the formation program afterward.
Here’s an interesting article in the Cornell Chronicle on disgust sensitivity and political ideology. (It looks like conservatives are literally more squeamish that liberals.)
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/June09/pizarro.disgust.lg.doc.html
The conclusion: “The research speaks to a need for caution when forming moral judgments, Pizarro added. “Disgust really is about protecting yourself from disease; it didn’t really evolve for the purpose of human morality,” he said. “It clearly has become central to morality, but because of its origins in contamination and avoidance, we should be wary about its influences.”
Let me recommend once more the Edge Conference on MOrality. The bright young moral psychologists there say so much that is relevant to this thread and others. And they seem genuinely open to other researchers findings, which one doesn’t always find in scientists. And they know some philosophy :-) Some are even seem open to religious values.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/morality10/morality.haidt.html
Yes, Cathy, psychologists these days seem to count disgust as among the most basic emotions, along with anger and fear, and maybe some others. In other words, it isn’t learned, or need not be. Another thing that is emerging is that liberals are generally (not always) philosophical utilitarians (do the greatest good for the greatest number), while conservatives are generally deontologists (do the right thing always without exception). Both, however, will sometimes appeal to the other’s basic principle.
We are disgusted by things others of our ilk consider disgusting. This behavior is learned. Why does it matter?
In the early days of the church in the US, when Irish nuns were the principal sources of Catholic education, they were known to be quite put off by the “dirty” Italian and Polish students. Of course, this had nothing to do with prejudices against these “others.” No, not at all.
And I’ll be they thought their breath was bad, too.