Perpetrator Disgust

Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic is a research associate at the Moral Injury Lab, University of Virginia and a Teaching Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen. In this post, she tells us about her new book, Perpetrator Disgust (OUP 2023).

What is the significance of our gut feelings? Can they disclose our deep selves or point to a shared human nature? My book identifies and analyzes the phenomenon of “perpetrator disgust”. Across time and cultures, soldiers who participate in war crimes sometimes feel ill. They start to shake, feel nausea and sometimes even retch and vomit. As a philosopher, I’ve been interested in the many moralized interpretations that scholars and journalists have applied to the phenomenon.

In a nutshell, many have thought that such reactions demonstrate a sort of bodily morality, a physical revolt against the act being committed. But such interpretations are often wrong, especially when grounded in nativist ideas about morality and human emotions. As an alternative explanation, I draw on recent developments in the study of emotions to detail a comprehensive portrait of the phenomenon. I argue for a contextual understanding of human emotions as biological templates that can be hitched to a range of different values and morals.

Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic

In every culture, the pedagogy of disgust draws subtle lines of demarcation between us and them: Who should we care for? Who is repulsive and unworthy of concern? As revealed by the recent surge of research in implicit biases, feelings of disgust and discomfort can convey internalized moral values, including values that we may not endorse or believe in, even values we have forgotten about.

My central claim is that, in such cases, our feelings have merely a signaling function: they point toward some transgression of internalized values but do not necessarily reflect a moral judgment. Our feelings may make us aware that something is amiss before we are able to put words to the discomfort, but the bodily feeling itself does not entail a moral evaluation (though it may influence and even distort whatever judgments, decisions, or motivations that follow it). The book considers numerous examples to demonstrate the operation and complexities of this process.

The dominant trend shows that most soldiers are able to overcome the initial shock of killing and adapt to their new circumstances—and this applies even to soldiers who experience perpetrator disgust with explicit feelings of compunction. Soldiers who are altogether unable to cope with killing or who explicitly refuse or protest the atrocities are a rare, anomalous set. Even when a soldier can be said to feel some empathic concern for a victim, the specific context constrains the range of available actions in response to their empathetic impulse; often, the soldier’s actions become more atrocious with time.

There is thus no inherent direction or moral value in visceral feelings of disgust or horror. Through conditioning, the bodily capacity for such reactions can be molded in many different directions, to many different purposes, depending on ideological and moral circumstances. Our physiological reactions and gut feelings are biological templates onto which societies and circumstances imprint their particular values. Instead of reflections of morality, nature, or a revelation of our true self, gut feelings speak primarily to the facts of our time and place.