So, I read this article on Psyche which claims that all morality is reason based and the emotions don't have an impact.
Now, recently, I've been reading various papers all critiquing the idea that disgust is a moral emotion. There has been considerable research aligning disgust with moral judgments and it seems that some conservative philosophers use their feeling of disgust to effectively justify the moral wrongness of, say, genetic engineering. Thus the liberal philosophers are really exercised by this research and determined to show that it in now way means that disgust is evidence of moral wrongness.
And I just think, well, obviously.
This disgust 'tracks' a moral judgment or intuition of belief held by the person feeling the emotion.
Emotions are susceptible to reasons.
They 'might' have more wisdom that we do - a good example of this is given by Julia Driver when talking of Huckleberry Finn saving the slave Jim. At the time, Huck 'believes' that he is doing wrong, because Jim should not run away. But his compassion leads him to help.
But they will likely often track unconscious beliefs or judgments that we have inherited or that are residues of evolutionary psychology - our preference for people who 'look like us', for example.
The conservative philosophers experience a 'yuck' response when they think about bioengineering and, perhaps relying on research that suggests that disgust was a forerunner of moral emotions, suggest that their moral dumbfounding (that they can't explain exactly what's wrong with bioengineering) is proof that this points to some inherent wrongness.
Thing is, disgust was about physical health, not moral health - the reason not to eat faeces or vomit or rotting meat. We 'transferred' it across to express things we believed would be ethically repellent - like incest and cannibalism and bioengineering.
I really can't see what the argument is about.
Emotions are useful ethically as they can motivate us to action - indeed, without them, without valuing some things (love and justice) and disvaluing others (like cruelty and injustice), we would not be inclined to act. Oh, I know that Immanuel Kant says we should be through reason - and actually reason is vastly overinflated (in my view) in contemporary utilitarianism. But I think more of us would be more likely to act morally if we found a language or a framework to align certain useful moral codes and ways of thinking with emotional responsiveness.
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