I tripped over a journal article while going through a legal database and came across this:
In another experiment testing the correlation between a tendency to feel disgust and moral judgments, the researchers noted that disgust sensitivity tends to predict more conservative responses to moral issues, particularly “purity” issues like homosexuality and abortion. Thus, a person who feels disgust at the thought of drinking from a stranger’s glass is more likely to view homosexuality or abortion as morally wrongful.
If you want to read the original study, you can find it here. I haven’t had the chance. I did come across this summary article in Psychology Today:
Disgust is a marked feeling of revulsion or profound disapproval aroused by something unpleasant, distasteful, or offensive. The things that consistently arouse disgust are also things that make us sick, such as excrement and corpses, which are sources of life-threatening bacteria and viruses. So it is believed that the disgust response helps us avoid contaminated items that could give us a disease and, in evolutionary terms, reduce our chances of survival and reproduction. Because of its role in survival as well as the particularly old region of the brain (anterior insula) that is most active when people experience disgust, it is often described as one of the original emotions and thought of as a building block for other emotions.
So what’s the political connection? Evidence suggests that harm avoidance and the need for fairness underlie people’s moral judgments in a number of cultures. While liberals rely primarily on these two values, conservatives also rely on desires for group loyalty, authoritative structure, and, most importantly here, purity. Following this logic, Kevin and other researchers became interested in the potential for a relation between disgust and political orientations. They speculated that conservatives are more disgust sensitive than liberals as a result of their concern with purity-related norms and that this difference would manifest itself on issues that some may associate with sexual purity (e.g., homosexual sex and, therefore, gay rights). […]
I believe Kevin and I share an important and vastly underappreciated perspective on political behavior: some political attitudes are biologically influenced. People do not fully control their responses to disgust, just like they do not fully control their responses to evolutionary predispositions … A broader understanding of this may take some of the nastiness out of our current political rhetoric as people comprehend how their political opponents can sometimes come to what seem like incomprehensible positions.
Again, I don’t have time to look into the study’s methodology, but at face value, what do you think of their findings? Is being pro-life simply a nature versus nurture outcome? (I don’t.)
I’ve been pro-life since I was about 19 years old. Did my “nature” suddenly change 11 years ago?
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What strikes me as odd about this is how quickly and cavalierly he authors tend to dismiss deeply rooted (perhaps biologically rooted) emotions. I’m with you, Faye, in that I think that there is a purely rational basis for being prolife, but I’m becoming increasingly disturbed by the way modern society seems to be viewing our inherent biologies as something to be overcome, not worked with. It is almost like modern society is saying, “Well, those primitive religious people are all hung up on the way our bodies used to work fifty years ago, but we’ve evolved past that now. We are no longer slaves to our bodies, but masters of them.” Nevermind that evolution doesn’t happen over the course of a couple generations, and subduing our physical natures comes with costs: financial, social, emotional, and otherwise.
It’s almost like modern society views the human body as something to be overcome. Which kind of begs the question, if we are not our bodies, then what are we? Especially as, at the same time modern society seems to deny the human body, it also vehemently denies the existence of the human soul. We seem to be caught up in a semi-gnostic heresy.
Anyway, my thoughts on this aren’t terribly well fleshed-out. But in general, I tend to think that our intuition has its own inherent wisdom, and if your gut feeling is that something makes you squeamish, then that is something to be avoided, or at least examined more closely before you follow along blindly and join in the melee.