Ditching Disgust: Does ‘icky’ behaviour harm others?

By Heidi Matisonn

Disgust has been described as the ‘unlikely academic star of our time’ (Strohminger 2014). Whether it’s a yuck, a yecch, or an ick, expressions of disgust indicate repugnance and often, the first step to rejection.  ‘Icky’ makes its first appearance in the 1920s and the ‘ick factor’ has been used in a variety of contexts ever since: In an episode of Friends from 1995, Ross gets jealous when his girlfriend tells him about her erotic dreams involving his best friends while his sister finds out that her new boyfriend is an under-age virgin in high school. The title of the episode is ‘The one with the ick factor.’  

In 2005, the Wall Street Journal’s Tara Parker-Pope reported that a home-screening test for colon cancer is making a comeback but ‘convincing consumers to use the tests may be tough because there’s the ick factor of fecal tests, which typically require patients to smear stool on a card that is then sent to a lab’.

And in 2010, Mike Huckabee explained in the New Yorker (and subsequently confirmed on his website) that it is his belief that ‘God created male and female and intended for marriage to be the relationship of the two opposite sexes. Male and female are biologically compatible to have a relationship. We can get into the “ick factor”, but the fact is two men in a relationship, two women in a relationship, biologically, that doesn’t work the same.’

This type of reasoning is, at least implicitly, what philosophers call ‘an appeal to nature’ in that something is argued to be good (or right) because it is natural. Such arguments are problematic because they are unsound, containing as they do a false premise. That is, there are very many things in this world that are ‘natural’ and very bad for you – bushfires in Australia, floods in the UK, and viruses like COVID-19 (see more COVID-19 research here). Similarly, ‘unnatural’ things can be very good – medical interventions, machinery, and so on.

So let’s leave aside the issue of whether something is natural or not, and consider alternative candidates for moral evaluation. John Stuart Mill proclaimed that ‘the only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others.’  

Does ‘icky’ behaviour harm others? Perhaps. But we need evidence, not inclination. Philosophy is about justified true beliefs – not just beliefs. There is no doubt that our feelings, especially instinctive ones like disgust, do influence our views on what is right and wrong.  But feelings, like beliefs, cannot be used to justify such views. 

Assume though that we have evidence there is harm involved. It may nevertheless be possible to justify the moral permissibility of doing icky things. To Mill again: his ‘Harm Principle’ contains another insight, that ‘Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.’

What he is getting at is consent, another contender in moral debates and one that enjoys considerable currency. In defining consent, we need to avoid the risk of circularity: something cannot be permissible simply because we permit it.  That may be true, but it is not useful in helping us decide whether we should permit it. For consent to represent anything morally meaningful, it must be autonomous. At a minimum, autonomy is the capacity to make an uncoerced, informed choice - we must be able to say no (even if we don’t), and we must understand what we are saying yes to. 

What this suggests is that even if something has the potential to (or actually does) harm us, we can still do it, as long as we know what we are doing and could have chosen not to do it.  And there are plenty of things that fit into this category: from being in a boxing ring to bungee-jumping off a bridge.

The origin of disgust has been linked to evolution: it may have enabled us to discern and thus avoid disease for example, as discussed in “A Proximal Perspective on Disgust.”  But it is a short jump from discernment to discrimination and recent appeals to disgust seem ‘to discriminate against people and things which pose no danger’ (Fleischman 2017).  

If we’re going to be disgusted by something, it should be that.