Just Babies (17 page)

But why is sexual activity disgusting in the first place? Rozin and his colleagues have suggested that while disgust evolved to defend the physical body, it has transformed over
the course of human history to a more abstract defense of the soul.
We are now disgusted by anything that threatens our self-image as pure, elevated beings and reminds us that we are animals. So people who ignore the sexual boundaries prescribed by our cultures are seen as disgusting and beastly: “Insofar as humans behave like animals, the distinction between human and animals is blurred, and we see ourselves as lowered, debased, and (perhaps most critically) mortal.”

Similarly, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that while “primary disgust” (elicited by feces, blood, and the like) evolved to steer us away from contaminants, disgust toward people is motivated by a desire to denigrate members of other social groups; it is
“a stratagem adopted to cordon off the dominant group more securely from its own feared animality.” The reasoning goes something like this: “If those quasi humans stand between me and the world of disgusting animality, then I am that much further from being mortal/decaying/smelly/oozy myself.”

I find these proposals unlikely. They are far too abstract and intellectual. A seven-year-old who is grossed out at the thought of cooties, or who gasps in revulsion upon hearing what her parents have been up to in the bedroom, is not upset because she has been reminded that she is an animal, or because she worries about death. In fact, abstract concerns about animality and mortality aren’t tied to revulsion in the first place. If reminders of our animal nature disgusted us, then evolutionary trees and diagrams of the double-helix structure of DNA should make us retch, as
they are stark reminders of our biological natures. Similarly, death may scare or sadden people, but it doesn’t gross us out. Dead bodies are certainly disgusting, but nobody gags at the sight of mortality tables.

Sex is disgusting for a much simpler reason. It involves bodies, and bodies can be disgusting. The problem with the exchange of bodily fluids isn’t that it reminds us that we are corporeal beings; it is that such fluids trigger our core disgust response. Other drives shut down or inhibit this response—including love and lust. But disgust is the natural default.

S
TILL
, Rozin and Nussbaum are on to something when they say that our intuitions about morality are influenced by concerns about purity.
Physical cleansing is part of the rituals of many religions, as in baptism by Christians and Sikhs, and
wudu
(the washing of certain parts of the body prior to worship) in Islam. This hints at a relationship between physical cleanliness and spiritual cleanliness.
We see this connection as well in language.
Clean
and
dirty
, for instance, can refer to properties of physical objects but also to reputations and policies. We can describe offensive language as “filth,” intentions as “pure,” and so on.

And then there is
the Macbeth effect. The psychologists Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist did a series of studies in which they asked some of their participants to think about their prior bad deeds. These individuals, reminded of their moral impurity, ranked cleaning products (like soap and toothpaste) as more desirable and were more likely
to choose an antiseptic wipe over a pencil as a gift.
In a follow-up study, the psychologists Spike Lee and Norbert Schwarz asked people to role-play a scene where they conveyed a malicious lie by either voice mail or e-mail. Then the participants evaluated consumer products. Those who did the evil act over voice mail (with their mouths) preferred mouthwash; those who did it over e-mail (using their hands) preferred hand sanitizer.
And this cleaning actually did help to alleviate guilt and shame. When Shakespeare had Lady Macbeth scrub her hands after the stabbing of King Duncan, he knew what he was doing.

In another study, Zhong and his colleagues found that
reminders of cleanliness make subjects more disapproving toward acts like watching pornography. This makes sense considering the connection with physical cleanliness—just as someone who is very physically clean might be concerned about getting physically dirty again, someone who has become morally pure might be motivated to avoid moral contamination.

Even a subtle reminder of purity can have an effect. The psychologists Erik Helzer and David Pizarro approached students in a public hallway and asked them a series of questions about, among other things, their political orientation. Students who were approached while they were standing next to a hand-sanitizer dispenser tended to state that they were more conservative than students who weren’t standing close to the dispenser. In a second experiment, students were brought into the laboratory. Some of them were reminded of purity—there was a sign saying “Experimenters: Help keep
the lab clean by using hand wipes!”—and they were asked to wipe their hands before using the keyboard.
In comparison to those who didn’t get purity reminders, these subjects rated themselves as more politically conservative and were more disapproving of actions that could be seen as sexually impure, such as “While house-sitting for his grandmother, a man and his girlfriend have sex on his grandmother’s bed” and “A woman enjoys masturbating while cuddling with her favorite teddy bear.”

An increased focus on purity, then, influences the moral assessment of others’ actions, particularly in the domain of sex. Now, in these experiments, purity was influenced by subtle situational factors, such as seeing a Purell dispenser or cleaning one’s hands with an antiseptic wipe. In the real world, social movements often rely on reminders of purity that are anything but subtle. The term
ethnic cleansing
is a new one, but the idea is very old—one can justify the expulsion of a group on the grounds that they taint the purity of a nation.

In fact, most people alive are committed to systems of belief and practice that put great emphasis on keeping one’s body and soul pure. I am speaking, of course, of the major religions, such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism. These emphasize what anthropologist Richard Shweder and his colleagues describe as
an ethics of divinity, which revolves around concepts such as “sacred order, natural order, tradition, sanctity, sin, and pollution.” It is little wonder that these religions are so deeply invested in the morality of sexual behavior.

I
F
I am correct, then, the moral outrage directed toward those who engage in incest, homosexuality, bestiality, and so on is not a biological adaptation. Individuals who disapprove of these activities do not reproduce more than those who are indifferent, and societies with many such disapproving individuals are not more successful than those without them. Instead, this aspect of moral psychology is a biological accident. It just so happens that evolved systems that keep us away from parasites and poisons respond in a certain negative way to sexual activity. Over the course of history, this aversive reaction has been reinforced, directed, and sanctified by various cultural practices, including religion and law.

Does our response to sexual behavior even count as morality? Under some theories, it doesn’t. The psychologist
Elliot Turiel defines morality as “prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other”;
Jonathan Haidt defines it in terms of “interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.” The issues that I have discussed in earlier chapters—including compassion, fairness, and punishment—mesh well with these definitions.

But sexual morality is not about “justice, rights, and welfare,” and it’s not necessarily about “how people relate
to each other.” After all, sexual morality can often extend to a person by him- or herself, or to a person and something else that’s not a person but rather animal, vegetable, or mineral. Nor is it obvious that our sexual morality serves to “make cooperative societies possible.” It didn’t evolve for that purpose (or for any purpose), and there is little reason to believe that it serves any such role in the here and now. Imagine that some virus were to spread tomorrow that had a very specific effect—it destroyed part of the anterior insula, so that people no longer felt the emotion of disgust. Our other moral capacities would remain fully intact, so we would still recognize the wrongness of sexual crimes such as rape and pedophilia, as these are wrong on more general grounds. But the instinctive “Yuck” reaction that drives many people’s responses to the consensual sexual activities of others would disappear. Is it really so obvious that if this were to happen, society would fall apart? Hardly.

So by certain definitions, what I’ve been calling sexual morality isn’t morality at all. But all this shows is that the definitions are incomplete. Our response to sexual violations may be a biological accident, but it feels no different from other moral responses that have evolved as adaptations. Sexual morality is connected to guilt, shame, and anger. It fuels a desire for punishment. And it is codified in law and custom, just like other sorts of moral restrictions. For example, the book of Leviticus in the Hebrew Bible states that sex between men is punishable by death; this rule appears right next to the punishment for cursing your parents (death), the punishment for blasphemy (death
by stoning), and the punishment for a priest’s daughter if she becomes a prostitute (death by burning). All of this is preceded by
a poetic plea for kindness to the handicapped (“Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling-block before the blind”). Some contemporary legal systems do put forbidden sexual acts such as homosexuality into their own special category, but still, they are thought of as crimes in precisely the same way as murder and assault.

And many people believe that they should be crimes and that disgust is a reliable moral guide. In a famous article, the physician and bioethicist Leon Kass made the case for what he calls
“the wisdom of repugnance”:

Revulsion is not an argument; and some of yesterday’s repugnances are today calmly accepted—though, one must add, not always for the better. In crucial cases, however, repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it. Can anyone really give an argument fully adequate to the horror which is father-daughter incest (even with consent), or having sex with animals, or mutilating a corpse, or eating human flesh, or even just (just!) raping or murdering another human being? Would anybody’s failure to give full rational justification for his or her revulsion at these practices make that revulsion ethically suspect? Not at all.

My own view is different. I think that the intuitions associated with disgust are at best unnecessary (after all,
there are other reasons to argue against rape or murder) and at worst harmful in that they motivate irrational policies and license savage behavior.

For one thing, even if we knew nothing about psychology or evolution, a brief look at the history of disgust illustrates its unreliability as a moral cue. The revulsion that Nazis felt toward the Jews, or that most Americans felt toward interracial marriage, is precisely the same sort of revulsion that many of us currently feel toward certain groups and activities. Since it is clear that disgust got it wrong in the past, why should we trust it now?

But the real argument against disgust isn’t merely that it sometimes leads us astray. Nothing is perfect. It is easy to think of cases where reasonable deliberation led people to conclusions that we now recognize as morally abhorrent, or where an empathetic response turned out to be the immoral one. But when reason goes wrong, it is because the premises were faulty, or there was a mistake in logic. When empathy goes wrong, it is because it was unfairly or arbitrarily applied, or because it led to the violation of other considerations, such as fairness. Disgust is different. Relying on disgust is like relying on a coin toss. When a coin toss gives the wrong answer, it’s not because you are throwing it the wrong way. It gives the wrong answer for the same reason that it sometimes gives the right answer—by accident.

Repugnance is different in this regard from the other moral capacities we have been discussing. The rest of morality has emerged through processes, such as biological evolution and cultural innovation, which are sensitive to
the problems faced by self-interested individuals who have to get along with other self-interested individuals. Evolution brought our species partway toward a solution, giving rise to sentiments such as compassion for those who suffer, anger at cheaters and free riders, and gratitude to those who are kind. These are inspired solutions, evolved over millennia, to the problems that faced us as humans living in small groups. As individuals who now live in a much different world, we can build from this, stepping away from our own specific circumstances and developing and endorsing moral principles of broad applicability. Such principles reflect values that, as rational and reflective beings, we are willing to sign on to.
This
deserves to be called wisdom.

6

F
AMILY
M
ATTERS

A young woman meets a much younger man and takes him into her home. He suffers from serious limitations. He cannot walk or talk or even sit up; he cannot be left alone and must be fed and bathed. He often screams and cries at night, and she spends the first years with him in a sleep-deprived fog. Still, this is the most important relationship of her life. She would die for him. She dedicates many years to nursing him as he gradually becomes able to walk, to toilet himself, and to speak. After they have been together for a bit over a decade, he becomes interested in other women and begins to date, and eventually he leaves her home and marries someone else. The woman continues to love and support him, helping to raise the children that he has with his new wife.