Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by Woodchopper » Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:22 am

discovolante wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:18 am
plodder wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:04 am
almost all species don’t f.ck other species. disgust is considered to be (at its root) innate in humans - see my link above. Our tolerance to disgust has a learned component but the sensation itself is not. It may be possible to train out feelings of disgust but these are extreme circumstances (ie training abbatoir workers etc)
You have clearly never experienced a dog humping your leg.
Yes, and lots of other animals attempt to hump various inanimate objects.

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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by Tessa K » Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:23 am

discovolante wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:18 am
plodder wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:04 am
almost all species don’t f.ck other species. disgust is considered to be (at its root) innate in humans - see my link above. Our tolerance to disgust has a learned component but the sensation itself is not. It may be possible to train out feelings of disgust but these are extreme circumstances (ie training abbatoir workers etc)
You have clearly never experienced a dog humping your leg.
I meant to include that in my previous post but got distracted by melons and cucumbers, so yes, that too.

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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by Woodchopper » Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:26 am

Tessa K wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:22 am
There's a Playboy article on the best food to have sex with, which doesn't include meat (I didn't want to delve too far into Google on this one). I suspect this would raise eyebrows and cause a certain amount of disgust but a much lower level than meat-based sex. The lesson here is that some men will stick it in anything.
That's an interesting point. There are some tales of men using steak and women using salami. I suspect those would cause much less disgust than someone using a carcass. If so that's probably down to the latter being associated much more with necrophilia.

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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:26 am

discovolante wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:18 am
plodder wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:04 am
almost all species don’t f.ck other species. disgust is considered to be (at its root) innate in humans - see my link above. Our tolerance to disgust has a learned component but the sensation itself is not. It may be possible to train out feelings of disgust but these are extreme circumstances (ie training abbatoir workers etc)
You have clearly never experienced a dog humping your leg.
There's a few papers in the zoology literature about this sort of thing - sea otters shagging seals, seals shagging penguins, etc., not to mention the infamous "homosexual necrophilia in the Mallard" paper that won an Ig Nobel.

Plus the widespread existence of "hybrid contact zones" suggests that shagging closely-related species at least is pretty common (though in part these probably represent incomplete speciation - species aren't Boolean). Hormonal animals can often get a bit wayward or overly inclusive in terms of which stimuli they respond to.

Though I'm not sure whether shagging a dead chicken is more similar to shagging, or more like a complicated type of w.nk (cf grapefruits).
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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:38 am

Woodchopper wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:01 am
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 7:20 am
I think it's pretty obvious that if there's two ways to do something, one of which involves mistreating or killing an animal and the other doesn't, the other one is more morally correct. I don't see why lunch should be any different. But the ethical problems of the livestock industry are from what happens while the animals are alive, the crowded rearing conditions and slaughter processes etc., not what happens to the corpse.

I think the obviousness of this is why so many people get triggered by the mere presence of a vegetarian or vegan in their company.

I suppose there's also an argument around food waste - it's immoral to shag a chicken if you don't eat it afterwards. But seeing as, for most people (at least in wealthier societies), eating meat is mainly a recreational activity rather than a nutritional necessity, I don't see why eating it for fun is any better than shagging it for fun. Just make sure you enjoy yourself. And of course if people were really opposed to food waste they'd also object to the diversion of huge quantities of human-edible food to livestock in the first place.
These are consequentialist arguments. But most people don't base their morals on consequentialism, or at least not consequentialism alone. To take the example in the OP of someone shagging a chicken carcass, the revulsion people feel has nothing to do with animal welfare (as the chicken is already dead). That example is clearly a case of deontological morals - ie that an action is wrong regardless of the consequences of the action. Which is what you're arguing here:
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 7:20 am
Shagging an animal engenders disgust because of how people think about sex - it should be between consenting adult humans, yes, but people also find it disgusting when unattractive people have sex. A dead chicken is just an extreme version of Matt Hancock in that regard.
Though I disagree with your Hancock example.
Well partly. I was also trying to separate disgust from morality, because they're clearly separate (if often correlated).

Killing a chicken is clearly immoral. f.cking a live chicken is also clearly immoral, because it will suffer. f.cking a dead chicken seems morally neutral, albeit contingent on the circumstances such as how the chicken lived and died, and who's around to see you do it.

But that doesn't mean it isn't disgusting, and as others have touched on (npi) the reasons people feel disgust are probably related to deeply embedded cognitive heuristics that guide human behaviour.

For another example, eating a dog turd is clearly disgusting, but I don't think many people would consider it intrinsically immoral. f.cking a Bernard Matthews broiler seems to be in that kind of category - a psychological warning that an evolutionary imperative (to eat or f.ck) is being misapplied to the wrong stimulus (and potentially a dangerous one).


(eta I agree about Hancock - it was just a topical example. Many people do seem to find the idea of his sex life intrinsically gross. Personally, while there are several things about him I do find disgusting, sex isn't one of them.)
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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:41 am

Tessa K wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:23 am
discovolante wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:18 am
plodder wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:04 am
almost all species don’t f.ck other species. disgust is considered to be (at its root) innate in humans - see my link above. Our tolerance to disgust has a learned component but the sensation itself is not. It may be possible to train out feelings of disgust but these are extreme circumstances (ie training abbatoir workers etc)
You have clearly never experienced a dog humping your leg.
I meant to include that in my previous post but got distracted by melons and cucumbers, so yes, that too.
There's an infamous reddit post by somebody (an adolescent male, in case it needed to be said) who (mis)used a coconut and then hid it under his bed.

I won't go into details, but this Archer meme gives the gist:
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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by discovolante » Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:44 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:26 am
discovolante wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:18 am
plodder wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:04 am
almost all species don’t f.ck other species. disgust is considered to be (at its root) innate in humans - see my link above. Our tolerance to disgust has a learned component but the sensation itself is not. It may be possible to train out feelings of disgust but these are extreme circumstances (ie training abbatoir workers etc)
You have clearly never experienced a dog humping your leg.
There's a few papers in the zoology literature about this sort of thing - sea otters shagging seals, seals shagging penguins, etc., not to mention the infamous "homosexual necrophilia in the Mallard" paper that won an Ig Nobel.

Plus the widespread existence of "hybrid contact zones" suggests that shagging closely-related species at least is pretty common (though in part these probably represent incomplete speciation - species aren't Boolean). Hormonal animals can often get a bit wayward or overly inclusive in terms of which stimuli they respond to.

Though I'm not sure whether shagging a dead chicken is more similar to shagging, or more like a complicated type of w.nk (cf grapefruits).
Thanks for that. It seems I was justified in extrapolating from my lived experience ;)
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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by Tessa K » Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:44 am

David Cameron. Dead pig's head. Was the disgust and disapproval mostly to do with where he put it (allegedly) or with the level of privilege the act represented?

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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:48 am

discovolante wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:44 am
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:26 am
discovolante wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:18 am


You have clearly never experienced a dog humping your leg.
There's a few papers in the zoology literature about this sort of thing - sea otters shagging seals, seals shagging penguins, etc., not to mention the infamous "homosexual necrophilia in the Mallard" paper that won an Ig Nobel.

Plus the widespread existence of "hybrid contact zones" suggests that shagging closely-related species at least is pretty common (though in part these probably represent incomplete speciation - species aren't Boolean). Hormonal animals can often get a bit wayward or overly inclusive in terms of which stimuli they respond to.

Though I'm not sure whether shagging a dead chicken is more similar to shagging, or more like a complicated type of w.nk (cf grapefruits).
Thanks for that. It seems I was justified in extrapolating from my lived experience ;)
I managed to get through many years of life without being humped by a dog - it was just last year, in fact.

Though the dog in question had been neutered, and I'm led to believe it's also about dominance - isn't it ever?
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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:49 am

Tessa K wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:44 am
David Cameron. Dead pig's head. Was the disgust and disapproval mostly to do with where he put it (allegedly) or with the level of privilege the act represented?
I mean, a dead pig's head isn't particularly expensive (though it may be hard to come by).
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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by Martin Y » Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:58 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:49 am
Tessa K wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:44 am
David Cameron. Dead pig's head. Was the disgust and disapproval mostly to do with where he put it (allegedly) or with the level of privilege the act represented?
I mean, a dead pig's head isn't particularly expensive (though it may be hard to come by).
I suspect most of the reaction was a kind of glee at the humiliating indignity of the story being told.

I can remember students union formal events with a a posh buffet laid out with a pig's head as a table decoration. Weird the first time I saw one but you just learn and accept that's how these things go. And that such events got very drunken and behaviour was not always the most dignified by the end of the evening, I have no recollection of anyone doing anything untoward with one of those pig's heads beyond some wag giving it a cigarette but I find it oddly believable that some young student could be goaded or dared to do what Cameron supposedly did.
Last edited by Martin Y on Wed Jun 30, 2021 9:12 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by discovolante » Wed Jun 30, 2021 9:00 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:48 am
discovolante wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:44 am
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:26 am


There's a few papers in the zoology literature about this sort of thing - sea otters shagging seals, seals shagging penguins, etc., not to mention the infamous "homosexual necrophilia in the Mallard" paper that won an Ig Nobel.

Plus the widespread existence of "hybrid contact zones" suggests that shagging closely-related species at least is pretty common (though in part these probably represent incomplete speciation - species aren't Boolean). Hormonal animals can often get a bit wayward or overly inclusive in terms of which stimuli they respond to.

Though I'm not sure whether shagging a dead chicken is more similar to shagging, or more like a complicated type of w.nk (cf grapefruits).
Thanks for that. It seems I was justified in extrapolating from my lived experience ;)
I managed to get through many years of life without being humped by a dog - it was just last year, in fact.

Though the dog in question had been neutered, and I'm led to believe it's also about dominance - isn't it ever?
I've been humped by male and female dogs. It may be about dominance, I'm not sure, but without looking it up I'm going to wildly speculate that we might be a bit overly obsessed with viewing every aspect of canine behaviour as being some sort of power struggle. Probably sometimes they're just horny.
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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by plodder » Wed Jun 30, 2021 2:41 pm

dogs hump each other for fun, pigeons are always at it, I’m sure friskiness is not as simple as you say. Dogs do hump legs, you’re right. Disgust is presumably relative, but it does appear to be linked to sensible survival behaviours.

Female dogs also do leg humping btw. Dominance and horniness are kinda connected, too.

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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by plodder » Wed Jun 30, 2021 3:07 pm

I *think* this is probably one of the seminal papers on the theory and development of disgust.

https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/web.sas.u ... 0oqhhu.pdf

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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Jun 30, 2021 10:19 pm

Mrs BoaF and I went out for dinner tonight, and this seemed a good topic of conversation.

Surprisingly, her take (offered without prompting) was similar to mine - that farming chickens to f.ck would be immoral, just as it is farming them for food, but once it's dead it doesn't make much difference. And she eats chicken pretty much every day (don't think she f.cks them though).
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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by Millennie Al » Thu Jul 01, 2021 12:56 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:38 am
Killing a chicken is clearly immoral.
I'd be fairly sure there is a large number of people who would disagree on that point.

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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by Martin_B » Thu Jul 01, 2021 1:35 am

Millennie Al wrote:
Thu Jul 01, 2021 12:56 am
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:38 am
Killing a chicken is clearly immoral.
I'd be fairly sure there is a large number of people who would disagree on that point.
I would argue that killing a wild chicken (if one exists) is immoral. Killing a farmed chicken is business.
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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by plodder » Thu Jul 01, 2021 7:06 am

Tessa K wrote:
Tue Jun 29, 2021 11:25 am
This is an interesting article. Why do many people think shagging an animal is worse than eating one? More generally, how do we separate what disgusts us from what we rationally consider wrong?
Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Righteous Mind, talks about a phenomenon called “moral dumbfounding”. That is: when something is disgusting, and you want to say that it’s immoral, but you can’t think of a reason why it’s immoral. So you end up simply saying it just is. One example he gives is of a man going to the shops and buying an oven-ready chicken. That evening, before cooking it, he has sex with it. Then he cooks it and eats it. Is that immoral?
https://unherd.com/2021/06/why-is-besti ... isgusting/
back to the OP, it’s because disgust and morality are different things. The former is an innate reaction, the latter is a codified cultural or personal response.

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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by Woodchopper » Thu Jul 01, 2021 8:06 am

plodder wrote:
Thu Jul 01, 2021 7:06 am
Tessa K wrote:
Tue Jun 29, 2021 11:25 am
This is an interesting article. Why do many people think shagging an animal is worse than eating one? More generally, how do we separate what disgusts us from what we rationally consider wrong?
Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Righteous Mind, talks about a phenomenon called “moral dumbfounding”. That is: when something is disgusting, and you want to say that it’s immoral, but you can’t think of a reason why it’s immoral. So you end up simply saying it just is. One example he gives is of a man going to the shops and buying an oven-ready chicken. That evening, before cooking it, he has sex with it. Then he cooks it and eats it. Is that immoral?
https://unherd.com/2021/06/why-is-besti ... isgusting/
back to the OP, it’s because disgust and morality are different things. The former is an innate reaction, the latter is a codified cultural or personal response.
We can still think about why the innate reactions are different.

I suggest that its got nothing to do with the welfare of the animal. I suggest that most people's reaction is that bestiality degrades the human, but that killing and eating an animal doesn't.

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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by plodder » Thu Jul 01, 2021 8:17 am

Killing and eating a raw animal does.

There's your answer - disgust is at root a survival mechanism. The disgust from eating, putting things in the mouth i.e. oral disgust is considered by the paper I linked to to be the root of disgust. Presumably sexual disgust is also health-related, not least because of an extreme proximity to something covered in bacteria etc that could be ingested after the act. Similarly intimate interaction with corpses - it's the disease vector that drives the emotional response.

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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by Bird on a Fire » Thu Jul 01, 2021 8:19 am

Martin_B wrote:
Thu Jul 01, 2021 1:35 am
Millennie Al wrote:
Thu Jul 01, 2021 12:56 am
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:38 am
Killing a chicken is clearly immoral.
I'd be fairly sure there is a large number of people who would disagree on that point.
I would argue that killing a wild chicken (if one exists) is immoral. Killing a farmed chicken is business.
Business can be immoral (e.g. slavery).
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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by Woodchopper » Thu Jul 01, 2021 8:23 am

plodder wrote:
Thu Jul 01, 2021 8:17 am
Killing and eating a raw animal does.

There's your answer - disgust is at root a survival mechanism. The disgust from eating, putting things in the mouth i.e. oral disgust is considered by the paper I linked to to be the root of disgust. Presumably sexual disgust is also health-related, not least because of an extreme proximity to something covered in bacteria etc that could be ingested after the act. Similarly intimate interaction with corpses - it's the disease vector that drives the emotional response.
I agree. The disgust is about the person gnawing at the carcass rather than concern about the animal.

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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by Bird on a Fire » Thu Jul 01, 2021 8:23 am

plodder wrote:
Thu Jul 01, 2021 8:17 am
Killing and eating a raw animal does.

There's your answer - disgust is at root a survival mechanism. The disgust from eating, putting things in the mouth i.e. oral disgust is considered by the paper I linked to to be the root of disgust. Presumably sexual disgust is also health-related, not least because of an extreme proximity to something covered in bacteria etc that could be ingested after the act. Similarly intimate interaction with corpses - it's the disease vector that drives the emotional response.
I more or less agree on this. There's things that are immoral but not disgusting (e.g. shoplifting), and things that are disgusting but not immoral (e.g. coprophagy).

On the meat subject, I've noticed that there are some meat eaters who get a bit squeamish if presented with a dead animal that actually looks like one. e.g. in a Portuguese fish restaurant you'll often get given a whole fish, with its head and bones and skin and stuff, which they would find it a bit yucky to pick through, and they also wouldn't want to have to butcher their own meat. But once it's been processed by someone else it's yummy.
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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by El Pollo Diablo » Thu Jul 01, 2021 8:44 am

Martin_B wrote:
Thu Jul 01, 2021 1:35 am
Millennie Al wrote:
Thu Jul 01, 2021 12:56 am


I'd be fairly sure there is a large number of people who would disagree on that point.
I would argue that killing a wild chicken (if one exists) is immoral. Killing a farmed chicken is business.
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Thu Jul 01, 2021 8:19 am
Business can be immoral (e.g. slavery).
To be honest, I think there's an argument that killing a wild animal for food is less immoral than raising animals on a farm purely so you can kill and eat them. Until the point of death, the wild animal has had a free life to live, and the farm animal has been imprisoned, effectively. And the incentives for the actual death itself are to make it as fast and pain-free as possible - a shot straight through the neck or head, ideally, otherwise the meat is ruined.

Problem with that argument is that being wild and free is f.cking stressful, whereas living on a farm, where the farmer is incentivised to keep predators away, can be much less so if it's decent in terms of environment.
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Re: Disgust v morality (warning: contains sex)

Post by plodder » Thu Jul 01, 2021 8:47 am

Yes, one of the reasons vegetarians and meat eaters bicker is that meat-eaters don't appreciate the level of disgust that vegetarians feel. I assume this is an example of learned / acquired sensitivity to disgust, as it's rare that people are born / 'natural' vegetarians.

Reading this article again, it's dead interesting. Recommended.

https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/web.sas.u ... 0oqhhu.pdf

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