True or False: Incest Is Disgusting, Therefore Immoral

Reviews the book, Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust by Daniel Kelly (see record 2011-14856-000). Daniel Kelly, assistant professor of philosophy at Purdue University, covers two topics in his brief book Yuck! The first three chapters characterize the disgust reaction in normal adults; the last two chapters connect disgust and morality. The difficulties arise immediately with the definition of disgust. Kelly acknowledges rampant, diverse definitions but then just starts calling disgust an emotion and begins his analysis. Emotion is at best an inexplicable mash-up of behavior, physiology, and psychological feelings (e.g., Kagan, 2007). Kelly ignores that issue. Regardless of these difficulties, Kelly’s proposal is that the instinctive disgust reaction has today been co-opted by culture to serve extended functions such as marking ethnic boundaries. This is an intellectually stimulating book, especially if you can suspend your skepticism of several implicit theoretical assumptions. The scientific and phenomenological descriptions of disgust are quite good, and the connection between evolutionary theory and moral philosophy is interesting, if not completely convincing. Yuck! will appeal to students and scholars in evolutionary psychology and in moral philosophy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)