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Warrigal 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?
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".
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'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?