Abstract

Alongside the public and private, the sacred can represent a third social-political dispensation, as Raymond Geuss notes. The modern liberal public/private divide represents a historical anomaly, with the sacred putatively consigned to the private realm. However, recent empirical research into disgust and its influences on moral psychology casts doubt on the extent to which such schemes have in fact removed phenomena connected with the sacred from the public realm. In this paper, I argue for the continuity between disgust and the idea of ritual pollution, demonstrating how an understanding of the moral psychology of the latter phenomenon helps account for certain aspects of our ostensibly secular public realm. Of these aspects, I focus primarily on racism, and specifically individuals’ avowals of disgust in response to racism in the contemporary USA and UK. I argue that the idea of ritual pollution shows that such a response indicates a number of potential drawbacks to the socio-moral scheme underpinning the disgust, which in turn have the potential to limit social efforts to eradicate racism. I conclude that such socio-moral disgust is itself morally questionable in important ways, in addition to having the aforementioned instrumental shortcomings.

摘要

正如雷蒙德·盖斯所指出的，除了公共和私人，神圣可以代表第三种社会政治时代。现代自由主义的公私分界代表了一种历史反常现象，神圣的东西被推定为私人领域。然而，最近对厌恶及其对道德心理学的影响的实证研究让人怀疑这些计划实际上在多大程度上将与神圣相关的现象从公共领域中移除。在这篇论文中，我论证了厌恶和仪式污染的概念之间的连续性，展示了对后一种现象的道德心理的理解如何有助于解释我们表面上世俗的公共领域的某些方面。在这些方面，我主要关注种族主义，尤其是个人对当代美国和英国种族主义的反感。我认为，仪式污染的想法表明，这种反应表明支持厌恶的社会道德体系存在许多潜在缺陷，这反过来又可能限制社会消除种族主义的努力。我的结论是，除了上述工具性缺陷之外，这种社会道德厌恶本身在重要方面在道德上是有问题的。