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JackEmpty comments on Are Deontological Moral Judgments Rationalizations? - Less Wrong
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A small nitpick, and without having read the other comments, so please excuse me if this has been mentioned before.
The 5 actions listed under the heading "Emotion and Deontological Judgments" squick me. But they don't disgust me.
From Urban Dictionary:
It may be useful to add this to our collective vocabulary. Some might argue it's adding unnecessary labels to too-similar a concept, but I think the distinction is useful.
Please, let me know if something like this has been explored already?
Cool word!
Wow. I have the practice (common to sci-fi readers, I have heard) of taking unfamiliar words in my stride, attempting to figure them out in context, and taking it on faith that if I can't figure it out now, more context will soon be given. So that is how I approach new words on the internet (like 'squick'). This is only important because my internal definition for squick had developed into something very much like saying "eww" or the word disgust. It didn't have that crucial 'no moral component' tag for me. Interesting!
Likewise, but I think I have a bit of an obsession with learning obscure jargon... to the point of reading through the provided dictionaries in SF&F books a half dozen times, then referring to it when the words come up. And reading through online lists of terminology for fictional universes and technical activities.
But yes, searching for "squick" on here, I have seen it used as "eww", but I'm not quite sure from the brief glance if it had that particular tag, at least not explicitly.
Same here.
That Urban Dictionary definition entails that "disgust" does imply a moral component or a judgement that something is universally wrong. However, in my experience, it does not. I can easily imagine a little kid, or a grown adult, declaring a given food or smell or sight "disgusting" without having any objection to its existence. (I can, of course, also imagine a news article in which people interviewed describe someone's immoral behavior as disgusting.) The OED Online describes the word mainly as a visceral reaction and only in passing says it may be brought about by a "disagreeable action".
Instead of creating a new word for what "disgust" currently means and making "disgust" mean something else, perhaps we should leave "disgust" as it is and come up with a word for "moral revulsion". Something like "consternation" or "appallment".
I'd guess that there is at least one more variation: Sufficiently bad programming practices (e.g. hard coding "magic numbers" all over the source code) tends to inspire a feeling with a component of disgust in whoever has to maintain the code... Does this generalize? E.g. does discovering that part of the structure of a car is dependent on duct tape lead to similar reactions?
Yeah, it does seem to be phrased such as to imply that.
So the denotative meaning only very mildly indicates a potential for moral revulsion. But used in certain contexts, it does have heavy (heavier) connotations of moral revulsion. I think it's useful to have words for both the physical reaction side and for the moral reaction side, but I disagree with the UD definition in that "disgust" can be more of a generic umbrella term.
So... in other words, use "disgusted" when it's clear, or you mean both. Use "squicked" when it's unclear, and you want to only imply a physical reaction. And use "appalled" when you want to heavily imply moral reaction.
This is all just speculation and suggestion, but I do still hold that the word is useful.
Yes, I think I agree completely.
I think this is more of a prescriptive than descriptive definition of squick. In my experience, people who use the term do not necessarily mean that they make no moral judgment, and in fact, many people, including those who use the term, do not seem to acknowledge a difference between "this gives me a physical sensation of repulsion" and "this is morally wrong."