Disgust as embodied moral judgment

p. 129). More recently the bioethicist Leon Kass (1997) has written about “the wisdom of repugnance. ” He urges policy makers and the public to avoid judging technological innovations such as cloning on purely util-itarian grounds; rather, people should take into account their feelings of disgust, for such feelings tell us about boundaries that we should not cross. In this article we cannot say whether people ought to follow their feelings of disgust; we are concerned with whether they actually do use such feelings to guide their judgments and with the limiting conditions on such use. However, philosophers who argue for the importance of “psychological realism ” in ethics say that philosophers must know the psychological facts before they can issue normative guidance (Flanagan, 1991). There are several good reasons for supposing that disgust does in fact shape moral judgments, even when it is extraneous to the action being judged. The social intuitionist model of moral judgment (Haidt, 2001) builds on the insights of Hume to suggest that moral judgment is generally a result of quick gu