People can be disgusted by the concrete and by the abstract--by an object they find physically repellent or by an ideology or value system they find morally abhorrent. Different things will
disgust different people, depending on individual sensibilities or cultural backgrounds. In Yuck!, Daniel Kelly investigates the character and evolution of disgust, with an emphasis on
understanding the role this emotion has come to play in our social and moral lives.
Disgust has recently been riding a swell of scholarly attention, especially from those in the cognitive sciences and those in the humanities in the midst of the “affective turn.” Kelly surveys
the empirical literature and experimental results relevant to disgust and proposes a cognitive model that can accommodate what we now know about it. He offers a new account of the evolution of
disgust that builds on the model and argues that expressions of disgust are part of a sophisticated but largely automatic signaling system that humans use to transmit information about what to
avoid in the local environment. Drawing on gene culture coevolutionary theory, Kelly argues that disgust was co-opted to play certain roles in our moral psychology. He shows that many of the
puzzling features of moral repugnance tinged with disgust are by-products of the imperfect fit between a cognitive system that evolved to protect against poisons and parasites and the social
and moral issues on which it has been brought to bear. Kelly’s account of this emotion provides a powerful argument against invoking disgust in the service of moral justification.