Disgust Sensitivity and Evil
Notes from a dissertation by Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic
Below is some brief commentary from a dissertation on disgust sensitivity, morality and evil by Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic. You can read the full text here.
Dražen Erdemović, Anwar Congo and Henrich Himmler are all people who were disgust sensitive, and recall feelings of nausea when describing/watching their killings.
Congo in the documentary The Act of Killing describes this in more detail.
Does this indicate a sense of remorse or guilt in one’s actions? Does this undermine the notion that they’re purely cold-hearted killers?
Does it suggest human nature is intrinsically revolted by brutality?
Evidence suggests otherwise - genocidal policies are motivated by disgust sensitivity.
Our ability to feel for others is a double edged sword. We can sympathise with others, but we can exploit their suffering too.
Hannah Arendt eluded to this in her phenomenology - stating that we are subject to the moral and emotional judgment of others and therefore should study human morality and evil accordingly - context matters.
James Dawes - Another scholar of the subject.- “we are morally obligated to represent trauma, but we are also morally obligated not to.” - it is a dilemma
Susan Sontang - in her essay Regarding the Pain of Others - the real danger is ignoring atrocities and gruesome cruelty.
It brings about a paradox, according to Noel Carroll, whereby people voluntarily expose themselves to trauma. It’s an old paradox as well - Leontius experienced conflicting emotions of disgust and fascination when he saw publicly executed criminals.
People, including Arendt, are fascinated by perpetrators like Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann, in her words, was “terrifyingly normal”. A different description to perverted and inhuman.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno are also postwar scholars interested in the nature of evil.
Sontang has argued that moral numbness is a feature of human nature and, more specifically, adulthood:
“Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood. No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia”
I have often wondered why some people choose to go, or not to go, to the Nazi death camps. Why people go is arguably less mysterious - to pay your respects and remember the victims, and learn the harsh lessons of history. But why people don’t go is less clear. Many will argue that they are just ‘squeamish’. Is it not that we just find it comfortable confronting human nature at its deepest, most darkest points? Are we just afraid, more to the point, of realising the type of person that we could become if we didn’t behave in the correct way?
The neurobiology of disgust is fascinating as well. Robert Sapolsky touched on it a bunch in his book Behave.
One thing that stuck with me is that the most unique and recently evolved neurons in our brain (von-economo neurons) can be found in the insula, which is involved with disgust sensitivity—including moral disgust. This suggests that as group evolution gained traction in the past few hundred thousand years, reinforcing the delineation between good guys and bad guys—and justifying atrocities against the bad guys—with moral disgust was likely adaptive.
He also presents a quadrant that humans use classify Us and Thems — High warmth/high competence: pride; low warmth/high competence: envy; high warm/low competence: pity; low warmth/low competence: disgust.
Those nearing the disgust category are those more likely to face threats of extermination.