soreff comments on Are Deontological Moral Judgments Rationalizations? - Less Wrong

37 Post author: lukeprog 16 August 2011 04:40PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 18 August 2011 02:21:10PM 1 point [-]

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".

Comment author: soreff 18 August 2011 03:12:26PM 0 points [-]

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?