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The Moral of the Story: An Introduction to Ethics Nina Rosenstand https://textbookfull.com/product/the-moral-of-the-story-anintroduction-to-ethics-nina-rosenstand/
Mark Alfano, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Delft University of Technology
How do our emotions influence our other mental states (perceptions, beliefs, motivations, intentions) and our behavior? How are they influenced by our other mental states, our environments, and our cultures? What is the moral value of a particular emotion in a particular context? This series explores the causes, consequences, and value of the emotions from an interdisciplinary perspective. Emotions are diverse, with components at various levels (biological, neural, psychological, social), so each book in this series is devoted to a distinct emotion. This focus allows the author and reader to delve into a specific mental state, rather than trying to sum up emotions en masse. Authors approach a particular emotion from their own disciplinary angle (e.g., conceptual analysis, feminist philosophy, critical race theory, phenomenology, social psychology, personality psychology, neuroscience) while connecting with other fields. In so doing, they build a mosaic for each emotion, evaluating both its nature and its moral properties.
Other titles in this series:
The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness, edited by Kathryn J. Norlock
The Moral Psychology of Pride, edited by Adam J. Carter and Emma C. Gordon
The Moral Psychology of Sadness, edited by Anna Gotlib
The Moral Psychology of Anger, edited by Myisha Cherry and Owen Flanagan
The Moral Psychology of Contempt, edited by Michelle Mason
The Moral Psychology of Compassion, edited by Justin Caouette and Carolyn Price
Forthcoming titles in the series:
The Moral Psychology of Curiosity, edited by Ilhan Inan, Lani Watson, Dennis Whitcomb, and Safiye Yigit
The Moral Psychology of Regret, edited by Anna Gotlib
The Moral Psychology of Gratitude, edited by Robert Roberts and Daniel Telech
The Moral Psychology of Disgust
Edited by Nina Strohminger and Victor Kumar
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3
Joshua Rottman, Jasmine M. DeJesus, and Emily Gerdin
Jared Piazza, Justin F. Landy, Alek Chakroff, Liane Young, and Emily Wasserman
4
Eleanor Hanna and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
6
Carlton Patrick and Debra Lieberman
Introduction
Disgust: A Cross-Pollination
Nina Strohminger and Victor Kumar
For most of the twentieth century, moral philosophy and moral psychology had very little to say about disgust.
Partly this was due to a general anti-sentimentalist bent: emotions are messy, imprecise, and resistant to measurement. Who wants to get his or her hands dirty with such arational and unscientific phenomena? Philosophy has a long tradition of privileging reason over emotion—and of associating reason with men, emotion with women. Immanuel Kant and his rationalist heirs made reason the centerpiece of moral thought. Meanwhile, moral psychology in the modern era was dominated by the theories of Jean Piaget (1932), Lawrence Kohlberg (1974), and Elliott Turiel (1983), all of whom espoused the view that human morality emerged from reason and conceptual development. There was also a skepticism leveled against disgust, in particular. Disgust was dismissed by many psychologists as not even rising to the level of a proper emotion, whether implicitly (Russell 1980) or explicitly (Panksepp 2007). Disgust seemed more like a drive than an emotion—the counterpart to appetite, perhaps only a notch above nausea, and therefore not of much concern to the self-respecting psychologist. Never mind the importance of basic drives in human affairs—uniquely human cognitive capacities have been the overwhelming focus of social scientists. The rest, alas, are scraps left to the ethologists. The irony in this perspective is that disgust appears to be a uniquely human emotion (Kelly 2011; Rozin et al. 1993).
Sentimentalists in philosophy regard emotions as central to moral judgment. Some even hold that moral truth is defined in terms of emotional dispositions. Until quite recently, however, disgust never garnered any sustained attention from sentimentalists. For example, Peter Strawson (1962) inaugurated a broad research program on “reactive attitudes.” To hold a person responsible is, in part, to experience reactive attitudes like guilt and
Nina Strohminger and Victor Kumar
resentment. But the second- and third-personal reactive attitudes discussed were always varieties of moral anger (resentment, indignation, outrage) rather than moral disgust (repugnance, revulsion).
What it would take for disgust to be brought into the fold was some outsidethe-box thinking. It is no accident that the modern renaissance of moral disgust research was brought forth by scholars who are, individually and collectively, interdisciplinary.
In the 1960s, a Harvard-trained psychologist named Paul Rozin began to publish papers on food learning in animals.
These early papers took as their starting point the experimental findings of John Garcia (Garcia, Ervin, and Koelling, 1966; Garcia and Koelling 1966), which turned behaviorism on its head. According to behaviorist dogma, learning requires multiple trials to develop, and does not depend on which stimuli are being paired together. Garcia found that rats learned to avoid sugar water more readily when it was paired with nausea than when it was paired with a flash of light, even when the nausea followed several hours after consuming the flavored drink. What’s more, rats only needed a single instance to learn to avoid the water. It appeared that rats had a prepared learning mechanism for avoiding orally ingested toxins.
The Garcia effect, as it is known, suggests that food learning is not as straightforward as it seems. This is especially true for generalists like humans and rats, which must exploit available food sources while avoiding the dangers lurking in unfamiliar comestibles (Rozin called this “the omnivore’s dilemma”; 1976). Rozin explored many of these adaptive learning problems, including how children figure out what not to eat and how adults come to enjoy the sting of chili pepper (Rozin 1990). Disgust presents itself as a clear tool to help this learning process along—an advancement over mere distaste or nausea.
But disgust’s purview is not limited to food. Rozin’s great insight was to propose that the disgust we feel about physical objects is fundamentally related to the disgust at social objects. These different forms of disgust emerged in hominids over evolutionary time—starting with oral disgust and culminating in moral disgust (Haidt, McCauley, and Rozin 1994; Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley 1993). This research program drew heavily on classic accounts from cultural anthropology, notably the magical thinking documented by William Ian Frazer (1889) and Mary Douglas (1966).
In this way, the current interest in moral disgust, like so much else in modern psychology, can be traced to a reactionary movement against behaviorism.
Disgust is now on the map in moral philosophy too, thanks largely to one philosopher: Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum’s unusually broad interests extend from ancient philosophy to contemporary legal and political theory. In several books and articles, she offered the first sustained evaluation of disgust’s suitability in moral life. As a moral philosopher and legal scholar, Nussbaum located the emotion at the heart of deep moral and legal problems. She saw, for example, that disgust is used to justify laws concerning obscenity, prostitution, miscegenation, sodomy, homosexuality, necrophilia, stem cell research, and human cloning.
Nussbaum suggested that disgust plays a larger role in moral and legal practice than is generally recognized. However, she also argued disgust is a force for ill and that we should seek to minimize its role. Unlike other emotions, the content of disgust “is typically unreasonable, embodying magical ideas of contamination, and impossible aspirations to purity, immortality, and nonanimality, that are just not in line with human life as we know it” (Nussbaum 2004: 14). Strikingly, Nussbaum’s case is almost entirely empirically grounded. She draws on historical and sociological analysis of disgust’s role in sustaining prejudice and inciting genocide. At the bottom of Nussbaum’s case against disgust is a psychological theory about the content and function of the emotion. On this view, disgust serves to protect us from our animal nature. It is by understanding the function of disgust, Nussbaum argues, that we begin to appreciate its pernicious influence in moral practices. *
What you will find in these pages is work from the direct intellectual descendants of these scholars. Ideas, unlike children, usually have more than two parents, but Rozin and Nussbaum are largely responsible for the perspectives and debates that currently roil the field.
A foundational concern is taxonomic. How should we classify moral disgust? This taxonomic question can be inward-looking—how many types of moral disgust are there? It can also be outward-looking: how does moral disgust differ from other moral emotions, such as anger and guilt? These taxonomic inquiries can also turn existential. Is moral disgust even properly considered a type of disgust? Though these questions have been traditionally taken up by empirical scientists, they are essentially ones that call for conceptual clarity and analysis: that is, borrowing from the methods of analytic philosophy.
Disgust, perhaps more than any other emotion, tends to invite heated debate over its evolutionary and social origins. And is moral disgust a direct descendent of physical disgust, as Rozin originally suggested, or is the picture more complicated than that?
Nina Strohminger and Victor Kumar
Finally, there is moral disgust as considered through the social scientific lens. What kinds of circumstances elicit moral disgust? And what are the downstream consequences once moral disgust is elicited? Nussbaum pointed out that moral disgust seems to be written deeply into our legal codes—how ought we to quantify its influence in this domain?
Disgust is certainly not the only negative emotion implicated in moral cognition. Setting aside first-personal emotions like guilt and shame, many immoral actions and character traits elicit moral anger. Thus, another important empirical question about moral disgust is whether its occurrence follows any pattern. Are some types of moral violations more likely to elicit disgust than others? Perhaps the mechanisms of disgust more easily lend themselves to some psychological and social functions rather than others. Or, alternatively, are any and all moral violations likely to elicit disgust? Perhaps the only pattern is individual variation. Empirical and philosophical carving of the moral domain is likely to provide valuable resources for answering these questions.
Philosophers sometimes find themselves suggesting answers to these questions about the nature of moral disgust and its distinctive role in moral thought. However, philosophers are more likely to pose normative and metaphysical questions about disgust. First of all, even if disgust is a feature of moral thought, should it be? This question can be made more precise in at least two ways (Kumar 2017). Is disgust a reliable or unreliable influence on moral beliefs? Is moral disgust always irrational or is sometimes an appropriate way of responding to immorality? Answers to these questions require normative reasoning, but they should also be guided by empirical work on the causal relationship between moral disgust and other mental states.
Emotions have long been central to moral philosophy and not just because of a suspicion that they might be sources of wisdom or irrationality. Many philosophers have wondered whether the essence of morality is tied up with emotion. Just as secondary qualities like color are fixed by psychological dispositions, are moral qualities fixed by emotional dispositions? Perhaps what makes an action wrong is that people experience some form of negative affect toward it. Alternatively, are moral properties independent of, and merely tracked by, emotional dispositions? To couch these alternatives in terms relevant to this volume: are some actions morally disgusting because they cause us disgust or do they cause us disgust because they are morally disgusting? This question may not be as remote from the scientific study of disgust as many philosophers might assume.
This volume is divided into two parts: the science and philosophy of moral disgust. Together, these chapters illuminate descriptive, normative, and skeptical claims about the nature of moral disgust.
In chapter 1, Joshua M. Tybur, Catherine Molho, and Daniel Balliet propose that there are actually two types of moral disgust: moralized disgust and disgusting immorality. Moralized disgust is pathogenic or sexual disgust in a moral context (bestiality, cannibalism, homosexuality, pedophilia, and consuming tabooed foods). Disgusting immorality, meanwhile, is a metaphorical form of disgust that has been co-opted to moral condemnation, specifically marshalled in cases of indirect aggression. This proposal elegantly resolves the question of the nature of moral disgust by carving this space into two.
Ever since Rozin, physical disgust has been understood to have appeared in our ancestors before other forms of disgust. In chapter 2, Joshua Rottman, Jasmine M. DeJesus, and Emily Gerdin advance the provocative hypothesis that this view is mistaken: disgust originated to prevent contact with outgroups and other people acting in non-normative ways. Although this view does not totally jettison the role of pathogens in the original form of disgust (strangers are, after all, notorious carriers of illness), it suggests that disgust has been essentially socio-moral from its inception.
In chapter 3, Jared Piazza, Justin F. Landy, Alek Chakroff, Liane Young, and Emily Wasserman offer a bipartite account of moral disgust. First, they lay out the evidence that disgust, in itself, plays a functional role in the formation of moral judgments, and whether moral disgust overlaps with physical disgust. The experimental evidence for either of these propositions turns out to be quite thin. But the second part of their account shows that disgustingness nonetheless aids in classification of moral wrongs, particularly for acts that have no obvious harm or victim. They suggest disgust is associated with a particular and distinct type of behavioral response: ensuring normative compliance.
In chapter 4, Eleanor Hanna and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong consider how disgust, and particularly moral disgust, rears its head in contexts where frameworks of meaning are threatened, such as death salience and norm violation. Disgust functions to restore equilibrium to the person whose meaning framework has been disturbed, for instance, by affirming a moral framework that binds society together. One advantage of this theory is it shows how moral and other forms of disgust relate to one another under a common cause.
Disgust has the power to exacerbate moral judgments of responsibility, blameworthiness, and contamination. What does this mean for the victims of such harms? In chapter 5, Laura Niemi takes up this question in her chapter on disgust and sexual assault. She concludes that disgust potentiates the trauma of sexual assault and thus the spread of violence itself.
In chapter 6, Carlton Patrick and Debra Lieberman examine disgust’s power to affect a broad array of laws, especially those that aim for moral legislation, from sex to medicine to obscenity to social justice to violent crime. This chapter provides a singular bridge between evolutionary and legal levels of analysis, one that reflects the scholastic backgrounds of its authors.
Nina Strohminger and Victor Kumar
In the second half of this volume, philosophical issues take central focus. In chapter 7, Carol Hay begins by noticing that disgust is often a tool of moral persuasion, for example, in anti-abortion propaganda. She argues that disgust is systematically misleading. Although she acknowledges that emotions like disgust play an important motivational role, she argues that the epistemic failings of moral disgust shed light on the importance of reasons and reasoning in morality.
Joshua May, in chapter 8, is skeptical about the power of disgust. He argues that, as a tool, disgust can be used to mobilize supporters, but that is highly ineffective at changing people’s minds. Drawing on a systematic review of the empirical literature on disgust, May suggests that it is usually an effect, rather than a cause, of moral judgment.
In chapter 9, Daniel Kelly turns to metaphysical questions in moral philosophy. He uses disgust as a lens to explore whether moral properties are projected by the mind rather than discovered in the world. Metaethical discussion of moral projectivism is typically divorced from any serious psychological understanding of thought and emotion. By identifying the distinct mechanisms that make up disgust, Kelly offers an empirical explanation of how the property of disgustingness is projected onto the world.
In chapter 10, Alexandra Plakias brings together the moral psychology of disgust with food ethics. Broadly, she is interested in how psychology can help us to reform industrial food production, for example, enhancing animal welfare and combating exploitation. Disgust is often a source of resistance toward more responsible agricultural practices. Plakias argues that sustainability can be advanced by seeing disgust as a particular type of moral evaluation, one that protects the self from external threats.
In the final chapter, Carolyn Korsmeyer argues that we can better understand the role of disgust in morality by exploring analogies between ethics and aesthetics. Disgust is a response to the ignominious and also to the ugly. But simple generalizations about moral and aesthetic disgust are not borne out. Korsmeyer offers a more nuanced characterization of disgust, highlighting its allure, along with its intermingling with other emotions.
Disgust is an unusually promiscuous and multifaceted emotion, cropping up in a bewildering array of contexts: food, disease, manners, rituals, social status, sexual mores, injustice.
Perhaps for this reason, the chapters in this book often circle back to the question of how moral disgust relates to other manifestations of this emotion. It is not hard to see why this issue is so central. For scientists, this relationship is critical to understanding the evolution of moral disgust—whether
moral disgust is an exaptation from earlier forms of disgust or an adaptation in its own right. It is also foundational to disgust’s cognitive workings: how it shapes conceptions of impurity, reasoning about intent and responsibility, and the range of moral acts we find repugnant. Having a firm grasp on the origins of moral disgust reveals why disgust shapes public policy decisions the way it does and whether disgust is able to influence moral values across political lines. The natural history and cognitive workings of disgust fuel normative debates about its ability to reliably guide moral thought. It might also help to answer metaphysical questions about what it is to be disgusting.
Answers to psychological questions are beholden to conceptual analysis, and philosophical questions are beholden to empirical observation, making cross-pollination between these fields indispensable.
REFERENCES
Douglas, M. (1996). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge.
Frazer, J. G. (2006). The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Sioux Falls, SD: NuVision Publications, LLC.
Garcia, J., Ervin, F. R., and Koelling, R. A. (1966). “Learning with prolonged delay of reinforcement.” Psychonomic Science, 5(3): 121–22.
Garcia, J. and Koelling, R. A. (1966). “Relation of cue to consequence in avoidance learning.” Psychonomic Science, 4(1): 123–24.
Haidt, J., McCauley, C., and Rozin, P. (1994). “Individual differences in sensitivity to disgust: A scale sampling seven domains of disgust elicitors.” Personality and Individual Differences, 16(5): 701–13.
Kelly, D. (2011). Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kohlberg, L. (1974). Moralization: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach. New York: Holt, Reinhart & Winston.
Kumar, V. (2017). “Foul behavior.” Philosophers’ Imprint, 17: 1–17.
Panksepp, J. (2007). “Criteria for basic emotions: Is disgust a primary emotion?” Cognition and Emotion, 21(8): 1819–28.
Piaget, J. (1932). The Moral Judgement of the Child. London, UK: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.
Rozin, P., Haidt, J., and McCauley, C. (1993). “Disgust.” In M. Lewis and J. M. Haviland, editors, Handbook of Emotions: 575–94. New York: Guilford Press.
Rozin, P. (1976). “The selection of food by rats, humans and other animals.” In S. Rosenblatt, R. Hinde, E. Shaw, and C. Beer, editors, Advances in the Study of Behavior, volume 6: 21–76. New York: Academic Press.
Rozin, P. (1990). “Getting to like the burn of chili pepper: Biological, psychological and cultural perspectives.” In B. Green, J. Mason, and M. Kare, editors, Chemical Senses, Volume 2: Irritation: 231–69. New York: Marcel Dekker.
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Russell, J. A. (1980). “A circumplex model of affect.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(6): 1161–78.
Strohminger, N. (2014). “Disgust talked about.” Philosophy Compass, 9(7): 478–93. Strawson, P. F. (2016). “Freedom and resentment.” Proceedings of the British Academy, 48: 125.
Turiel, E. (1983). The Development of Social Knowledge: Morality and Convention Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Part I
THE SCIENCE OF MORAL DISGUST
Chapter 1
Moralized Disgust versus Disgusting Immorality
An Adaptationist Perspective
Joshua M. Tybur, Catherine Molho, and Daniel Balliet
We’ll open this chapter with a gambit frequently employed by disgust researchers during conference talks: disgust the audience to both grab their attention and ensure that they grasp the phenomenon at hand. So, clear your head, take a deep breath, and imagine standing in a crowded bus and yawning at the precise time that a stranger sneezes, spewing mucus and saliva into your open mouth. Further imagine biting into a sandwich and, after feeling a “crunch” between your teeth, looking down to half of a rat’s tail ensconced between the slices of bread, with the other half semi-chewed in your mouth. And finally, imagine that, while riding a roller coaster, the person sitting next to you experiences motion sickness and vomits on your chest. Hopefully we’ve aroused some disgust in you at this point, and we’ve made you think of the types of things that spark this feeling.
Now try to explain why you would feel disgust in these situations. If you avoid appealing to the types of circular definitions that even some psychologists find irresistible (e.g., “because it’s gross” or “because it makes me feel dirty”—for a discussion, see Tybur et al. 2013), you’ll probably arrive at some explanation grounded in your knowledge of the germ theory of disease. Relative to most of the other objects we come into contact with on a daily basis, saliva launched from someone else’s mouth, vermin that (literally) spread the plague, and vomit are each likely to contain infectious microbes. And disgust seems tailored to neutralizing contact with such things. The experience is associated with a facial expression that reduces the surface area of the eyes that could be exposed to pathogens and decreases air flow through the nose (Susskind et al. 2008); it motivates a desire to avoid physical contact (Roseman et al. 1994)—exactly the path through which microscopic, infectious predators (but not large predators with claws and fangs) threaten humans; and it shapes learning in a way specialized for avoiding those things
Joshua M. Tybur, Catherine Molho, and Daniel Balliet
likely to house microbes (Tybur et al. 2016). In sum, in combination with the types of things that elicit disgust, the effects of disgust imply that it is functionally specialized for a specific task: avoiding pathogens. This type of specialization is the hallmark of an adaptation (Williams 1966/2008).
Some instances of disgust do not seem to fit within a pathogen-avoidance account, though. To illustrate (and, again, hopefully evoke disgust), imagine sharing a passionate, open-mouthed kiss with your sibling (or, if you don’t have one, feel free to substitute a parent). Naturally, others’ saliva can transmit pathogens. But open-mouthed kissing with an attractive, genetically unrelated individual—an act with similar pathogen risk to kissing a sibling— elicits a positive reaction rather than disgust. One need not dig too deep into the evolutionary biology literature to realize that sexual contact with genetic relatives carries costs distinct from infectious disease, though: close kin are more likely to share deleterious recessive alleles, which, when inherited from both parents, seriously impair an individual’s survival (Charlesworth and Charlesworth 1999). Further, the prospect of sex with a sibling is more disgusting for individuals who perceive a greater probability of genetic relation with their sibling (Lieberman, Tooby, and Cosmides 2007). Again, the fit between form and function suggests that sexual disgust is an adaptation for avoiding sex with low compatibility or quality reproductive partners.
Still, other instances of disgust do not seem to motivate the avoidance of pathogens or sexual partners. Consider what many felt when hearing Donald Trump lecherously brag about his “grab them by the pussy” sexual tactics, or about his encounter with a married woman in which he “moved on her like a bitch.” Or, for an apolitical example, consider the reaction that many had when Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer paid $50,000 to hunt and kill Cecil, a beloved lion and tourist attraction in a Zimbabwean national park. Such events often evoke disgust expressed via both language and nonverbal behavior (Chapman and Anderson 2013). In contrast with pathogen and sexual disgust, the functions of moral disgust (if any exist) are opaque. Indeed, the literature is full of conflicting accounts of moral disgust: some researchers describe it as a “metaphor” (Royzman and Kurzban 2011); others describe it as merely the “lay meaning” of disgust, used by the (wo)man on the street to convey anger, as opposed to the “theoretical meaning” that is of interest to psychologists (Nabi, 2002); others argue that it functions to protect the social order (Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley 2008); and still others argue that it motivates avoidance of free riders (Curtis and Biran 2001).
These inconsistencies in accounts of moral disgust are partially rooted in the fact that researchers disagree on the types of events that elicit the emotion. Some perspectives suggest that moral disgust is elicited by only a subset of behaviors referred to as “purity” or “divinity” violations (e.g., incest) (Koleva et al. 2012; Rozin et al. 1999). Other perspectives suggest that moral disgust is elicited by a wider array of behaviors—perhaps by any behavior that can
be morally condemned (Chapman and Anderson 2013; Hutcherson and Gross 2011). And, as implied above, others suggest that “moral disgust” refers to an emotion no more than “green with envy” refers to a color (Nabi 2002)—that is, moral disgust is a quirk of language that does not reflect an emotional state distinct from anger.
This variety of perspectives on moral disgust can seem dizzying, especially when compared with the relative consensus on pathogen and sexual disgust. Here, we explore two factors that have contributed to this state of the literature (for similar treatments, see Landy and Goodwin 2015; Pizarro, Inbar, and Helion 2011; Tybur et al. 2013). On the one hand, researchers have used the single term “moral disgust” to refer to two distinct phenomena—what we label “moralized disgust” versus “disgusting immorality.” On the other hand, researchers have underutilized the evolutionary approach that has been so useful in understanding pathogen and sexual disgust. Here, we make use of this evolutionary approach to distinguish between moralized disgust and disgusting immorality.
APPROACHING MORAL DISGUST FROM AN ADAPTATIONIST PERSPECTIVE
The social sciences have been gradually evolutionized since the sociobiological revolution of the 1970s (Kenrick 2006). However, widespread adoption of evolutionary perspectives has been impeded by two issues. First, explanations derived from the perspective often conflict with intuitive folk psychology (Kurzban and Aktipis 2007). Second, evolutionary perspectives have been erroneously seen as supporting a right-wing political agenda, which liberal academics object to (Tybur, Miller, and Gangestad 2007). Even so, we are unaware of any critiques derived from these issues being launched at disgust researchers who use an evolutionary perspective. Instead, the highest-impact perspective on disgust (Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley 2008) explicitly proposes that pathogen disgust is an adaptation for avoiding infectious microbes, as have other widely cited theoretical works on the topic (e.g., Oaten, Stevenson, and Case 2011; Tybur et al. 2013). The fact that (a) pathogens clearly have impeded human survival and reproduction in the ancestral past, (b) things that elicit disgust often contain pathogens, and (c) the behaviors associated with disgust seem tailored for neutralizing pathogens renders this use of an evolutionary perspective relatively uncontroversial. Additionally, this use of an evolutionary perspective rarely raises the hackles of readers in the same way that studying sex differences does; whereas the latter can be perceived as justifying social inequalities (Tybur et al. 2007), the former has few social or political implications.
Nevertheless, some aspects of Rozin and colleagues’ (2008) same popular perspective sharply depart from adaptationism. The proposed “animal
Joshua M. Tybur, Catherine Molho, and Daniel Balliet
nature” aspect of disgust serves as a key example. Drawing from anthropologist Ernest Becker’s (1973) proposal that people are in a constant struggle against the recognition of their own mortality—and a putatively debilitating anxiety that would result from such a reminder—Rozin and colleagues suggest that many instances of disgust function to quell existential anxieties. Sex, corpses, poor hygiene, and open wounds purportedly elicit disgust because they remind people that they are animals, and, like animals, they will eventually die. Indeed, Rozin and colleagues argue that “anything that reminds us that we are animals elicits disgust” (p. 761), and disgust experienced toward these stimuli putatively “protect the body and soul” (p. 764). Several observations critically challenge this perspective (for summaries, see Royzman and Sabini 2001 and Tybur et al. 2013). For example, observing non-human animals engaging in myriad behaviors that humans also engage in (e.g., a chimpanzee eating, a dog sleeping, a cat sneezing) could increase the salience of similarities between human and non-human animals, but these behaviors elicit neither disgust nor apparent existential anxieties (Kollareth and Russell 2016). Further, no evidence suggests that disgust experienced toward corpses, wounds, or sex reduces existential anxieties. Most critically, the animal nature account posits that disgust functions to reduce an internally generated sensation rather than to motivate fitness-enhancing behaviors (i.e., roughly, behaviors that, relative to alternatives, increase survival and reproduction). In other words, the proposed function is entirely dedicated to reducing unpleasant sensations, which natural selection is blind to. Indeed, evolution shapes unpleasant sensations (e.g., pain, fear, anxiety) as motivators for behavior; unpleasant sensations do not shape the evolution of other palliative traits. Hence, our approach to understanding moral disgust will depart from the approach underlying the animal reminder perspective; instead of considering potential effects of moral disgust on hedonic experience (e.g., reductions of dissonance or anxiety), it will only consider behavioral consequences of moral disgust.
This focus on behavioral consequences can circumvent another shortcoming of multiple accounts of disgust: a reliance upon tautological definitions. For example, Darwin (1872/1965) described disgust as elicited by “something revolting.” Given that “revolting” is more or less synonymous with “disgusting,” this description does little to advance our understanding of disgust. Rozin and colleagues (2008) similarly argue that disgust is elicited by objects that possess a “sense of offensiveness” (p. 759)—that is, a sense of disgustingness—and that moral disgust is elicited by acts that are “sleazy”— that is, by acts that are disgusting. By forcing researchers to consider the fitness-relevant consequences of disgust elicitors, adaptationist perspectives sidestep the pitfall of tautology often seen in this area.
Taking an adaptationist approach does not commit a researcher to the claim that all traits are adaptations (Tooby and Cosmides 1992). As pointed out by Steven Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin (1979), two bulwarks against what they saw as promiscuous adaptationism, many traits are byproducts of other traits that were favored by selection. For example, rather than being shaped by natural selection due to some fitness-enriching effect, the belly button is the byproduct of the umbilical cord, which was shaped by selection (Buss et al. 1998). Of course, some traits that are not themselves adaptations can be used for different beneficial effects than those they evolved for (Gould and Vrba 1982). The belly button could be used to anchor a navel ring, which might enhance social status or physical attractiveness. Importantly, evidence that a trait is a byproduct can only follow from generating, testing, and rejecting adaptationist hypotheses (Andrews, Gangestad, and Matthews 2001). Because the belly button is the inevitable outcome of having an umbilical cord, and the putative beneficial effect is culturally specific (and very recent to the Western world), we can reject the hypothesis that the belly button is an adaptation rather than a byproduct. Rejecting such hypotheses is more difficult—but not impossible—for psychological traits, including moral disgust. The benefits of identifying adaptations are great, though; understanding what something is for can elucidate how it works. And, ultimately, generating and testing adaptationist hypotheses can yield beneficial information, even if doing so does not clearly adjudicate between adaptation and byproduct interpretations. In the spirit of these benefits (and the other benefits mentioned above), we first describe the potentially advantageous effects of condemning third parties who engage in pathogen disgust-eliciting and sexual disgust-eliciting behaviors.
MORALIZED DISGUST
Haidt (2001) begins his seminal paper on the social intuitionist model of moral judgment with a description of Mark and Julie, fictional siblings who, on a whim, decide to have sex. According to Haidt, most people who hear the story morally condemn Mark and Julie, and this condemnation is based upon “a quick flash of revulsion” indicating “that something is wrong” (p. 814). Reactions to this story putatively reveal that moral judgments are shaped by emotional intuitions rather than (only) considerations of harm done by the acts (though see Royzman, Kim, and Leeman 2015, for a critical reinterpretation of this finding). That is, most people experience disgust when thinking about committing incest themselves, and this disgust results in moral condemnation of others engaging in this same act. The same could be said for a variety of other acts that, on the one hand, have some disgust-eliciting content
Joshua M. Tybur, Catherine Molho, and Daniel Balliet
and, on the other hand, are also morally condemned. Examples include bestiality, cannibalism, homosexuality, pedophilia, and consuming tabooed foods. Based on the cross-cultural prevalence of moral condemnation of such behaviors, researchers have proposed that disgust-motivated “purity” morals form one pillar of moral cognition (Haidt 2012; Koleva et al. 2012). Here, disgust is the reason why a behavior is considered to be morally wrong. Indeed, the purity subscale of the popular Moral Foundations Questionnaire (Graham et al. 2011) is partially defined by the item “Whether or not someone did something disgusting.”
This perspective has inspired research programs testing whether experimentally manipulating experienced disgust increases moral condemnation. Several findings in this area suggest that moral condemnation can be increased by making participants experience disgust (e.g., manipulated via primes, such as a disgust-eliciting odor, taste, or image) before judging another’s behavior (e.g., Horberg et al. 2009; Schnall et al. 2008; Wheatly and Haidt 2001). However, a recent meta-analysis (Landy and Goodwin 2015) of this literature and a highly powered replication of one of these priming studies (Johnson et al. 2016) indicate that transient feelings of disgust do not increase moral condemnation. The lack of an amplification effect does not preclude the existence of disgust-based moral condemnation, though. Instead, it demonstrates that disgust experiences unrelated to a potentially condemnable act (e.g., a disgust-eliciting smell) have no effect on moral condemnation. Phrased in the computation language sometimes used to understand morality (e.g., DeScioli and Kurzban 2013; Mikhail 2008), disgust might only serve as an input to moral cognition if the disgust is elicited by the to-be-condemned behavior.
Why would people morally condemn pathogenic or sexually disgusting acts? Considering the costs and benefits of condemning third parties’ behaviors can help answer this question. On the benefits side, condemnation can signal attributes that are valued in interaction partners (Miller 2007). For example, condemning others’ selfishness or sexual promiscuity might communicate prosociality or a monogamous sexual orientation, respectively. It can also signal intentions to others, and hence allow third parties to coordinate their moral condemnation in a manner that attenuates costly moral conflicts (DeScioli 2016). And it can help shape the types of behaviors that are permissible within groups in a way that favors the moral condemner (DeScioli and Kurzban 2013). Consider how the alcoholic beverage industry’s market share and profits would suffer if consumers replaced beer, liquor, and wine with less harmful recreational drugs such as marijuana, MDMA, or LSD. Widespread moral condemnation of (and formal proscriptions against) the use of these drugs is advantageous to the alcoholic beverage industry’s profits (Nutt 2012). While industries contribute to political action committees and lobby politicians in an effort to shape laws that fit their goals, individuals rely upon
persuasive moral arguments that would support their interests. Instances of strategic moral condemnation are ubiquitous (Weeden and Kurzban 2014), with individuals taking moral positions that favor their own (fitness) interests.
Each of these benefits is mirrored by complimentary costs. If an individual condemns lying, cheating, stealing, or infidelity, he risks being condemned as a hypocrite and thus punished more severely if he engages in similar behaviors (Jordan et al. 2017; Laurent et al. 2014). Further, while condemning third-party behaviors can facilitate coordination, it can also signal allegiances and invite aggression based on group membership (DeScioli and Kurzban 2009). And, when voicing moral arguments, one risks shaping proscriptions against behaviors that could be beneficial in the future. For example, a person might contribute to the development of a rule against wealth redistribution by condemning social welfare, but he or she might find himself or herself poor and in need of that welfare later in life.
A moral psychology that simulates the potentially condemned behavior and uses an affective response to inform whether or not to condemn the behavior can mitigate these costs (DeScioli and Kurzban 2013). Experienced disgust— the “flash of revulsion” referred to by Haidt (2001)—might provide especially valuable information regarding the costs and benefits of condemnation, for two reasons. First, an experience of disgust is diagnostic of an individual having little interest in engaging in the behavior in the future. Hence, morally condemning behaviors with disgust-eliciting content puts an individual at little risk of (a) being perceived as a hypocrite by others in the future and (b) encouraging the development of a rule against behaviors that the individual might wish to engage in later. Second, the same experience of disgust might provide information regarding others’ likelihood to be on the opposing side of a moral debate, and thus be foes in a moralized conflict. If behaviors that elicit disgust in the self (e.g., incest) tend to elicit disgust in other individuals, then those other individuals are unlikely to strategically endorse the behavior.
This latter consideration might be especially fruitful in understanding the prevalence of condemnation of homosexuality—and, indeed, moral disgust toward homosexuals (Cottrell and Neuberg 2005)—which is especially peculiar given that homosexual behaviors have little apparent impact on third parties. Indeed, in a way, homosexuals are beneficial to same-sex heterosexuals’ reproductive interests, since they remove themselves as potential competitors for mates of the opposite sex. Nevertheless, results from a 2013 Pew Research Center study indicate that anti-homosexual sentiments are globally widespread, with over 10 percent of the population believing that society should not accept homosexuality in even the most liberal Western democracies (Kohut et al. 2013). Majorities are against homosexuality in nineteen of the thirty-nine surveyed nations (including Russia, Turkey, China, El Salvador, South Africa, South Korea, Ghana, and Malaysia), which span several
Joshua M. Tybur, Catherine Molho, and Daniel Balliet
religious, geographical, economic, and cultural backgrounds. Given that the majority of individuals are heterosexual—for example, around 95 percent of women and 94 percent of men in a population-based sample of Australian twins (Kirk et al. 2000)—and that people tend to experience disgust toward the prospect of sexual contact with individuals outside of their preferred sex and age range (Tybur et al. 2013), the majority of people likely experience disgust when contemplating engaging in homosexual behavior. When rules proscribing homosexuality are proposed within societies, individuals might process this disgust as indicating that they have little incentive to oppose such condemnation, since the disgust indicates that they are unlikely to be disadvantaged by the rule. Ultimately, this process could lead to the development of rules that punish homosexuality across a number of cultural lineages. That said, since most people experience few benefits in condemning homosexuality (unlike, say, the benefits that the alcoholic beverage industry gleans from marijuana prohibition), widespread condemnation of homosexuality might crumble under a few factors. Indeed, we’ve seen rapid increases in the acceptance of homosexuality in the United States between 1990 and 2014 (Schnabel 2016). If enough other people adopt the opposite perspective (i.e., that homosexuality should not be condemned), then the benefits of disgust as a cue to likely majority opinion evaporate. Further, if people perceive benefits from social relationships with homosexuals (e.g., via the so-called “Will and Grace Effect”), then they might also perceive disadvantages to morally condemning homosexuality (e.g., Schiappa et al. 2006).
People are often unaware of the reason why they judge a behavior to be immoral, and they can use their emotional reactions to the content of a moral violation as justification for their condemnation (Haidt 2001). This justification is the essence of this first type of moral disgust—certain behaviors are immoral because they are disgusting (cf. Graham et al. 2011). At the same time, myriad other condemned behaviors are described as “disgusting,” even if they have no relationship to pathogen or sexual disgust. Any functional explanation of this other type of disgust would need to differ from that described in this section. We detail the plausibility of different candidate explanations below.
DISGUSTING IMMORALITY
In response to morally condemned behaviors, such as those that benefit an actor at the expense of others (e.g., lying, cheating, stealing), people often verbally report being disgusted (Hutcherson and Gross 2011), rate models posing with disgust facial expressions as matching their emotional response to the behavior (Giner-Sorolla and Chapman 2016; Molho et al. 2017), and make facial movements similar to those that co-occur with pathogen disgust
(Chapman et al. 2009). Researchers have interpreted these observations as suggesting that moral disgust has a qualia similar to that associated with pathogen and sexual disgust (what has been referred to as “genuine feelings of disgust”; Chapman and Anderson 2011), and have further proposed that it engenders similar avoidance motivation (Curtis and Biran 2001).
However, evidence for similarity in qualia is elusive (Royzman and Kurzban 2011), and data suggest that reports of moral disgust are actually associated with less avoidance motivations than are reports of anger (Hutcherson and Gross 2011). Consequently, some have suggested that disgust toward moral violations is a “metaphor” (Royzman and Sabini 2001), in terms of either language or nonverbal behavior. The metaphor argument is couched in considerations of communication—information transmitted from an expresser to observers. However, the costs and benefits of such communication and even what this “metaphor” tells receivers have not always been articulated by the metaphor accounts. One possibility suggests that expressions of disgust toward moral violators communicate greater intensity of condemnation relative to communication of other emotions (Nabi 2002; Royzman and Sabini 2001). This account could be evaluated by testing whether the perceived moral wrongness of an act more strongly predicts rated disgust than rated anger. Two tests are inconsistent with this prediction; in samples of 819 and 347 participants, rated wrongness of moral violations was no more related to endorsed disgust (r’s = .22 and .16, respectively) than anger (r’s = .29 and .14, respectively) (Molho et al. 2017). Further, participants report less disgust when moral violations impact them directly—and, hence, would presumably be more objectionable—relative to when the same violations impact another person (Hutcherson and Gross 2011; Molho et al. 2017).
So if disgust toward moral violations doesn’t seem to motivate avoidance, and if it doesn’t seem to communicate stronger outrage relative to anger, what does it do? Two recent sets of studies have proposed that it might communicate intentions. In the first set of studies, Kupfer and Giner-Sorolla (2016) presented participants with scenarios in which an individual verbally expressed either anger or disgust after witnessing a moral violation. Participants rated the anger-expressing individual as more self-interested than other-interested, and they rated the disgust-expressing individual’s response as more other-concerned than self-concerned. In the other studies, Molho and colleagues (2017) found that anger—but not disgust—related to desires to directly aggress against (e.g., physically or verbally assault) the transgressor. In contrast, disgust—but not anger—related to desires to indirectly aggress against (e.g., gossip about) the transgressor. These latter results resonate with the former; if disgust versus anger toward moral violators is indeed associated with different behavioral responses, then individuals observing disgust versus anger from an expresser should anticipate different behaviors and motives.
Joshua M. Tybur, Catherine Molho, and Daniel Balliet
The literature is replete with evidence that anger motivates aggressive approach (Carver and Harmon-Jones 2009). Further, individuals who can benefit more from such aggression also become angry more easily (Sell, Tooby, and Cosmides 2009), and individuals who are victimized by a moral violation report more anger than those who observe the same type of moral violation committed against another person (Molho et al. 2017). The fact that anger is deployed differently across individuals and situations suggests that it is not without costs. Most notably, the type of direct aggression motivated by anger places an individual at greater risk for counter-aggression, either from the target of aggression or from his or her allies (Campbell, 1999). Because anger expressions honestly signal willingness to aggress against the target of the expression (Reed, DeScioli, and Pinker 2014), even expressing anger could result in such counter-aggression. Further, many immoral behaviors (e.g., failing to contribute to a public good) impose diffuse costs across individuals. Anger and direct aggression toward the free-rider can leave one vulnerable to exploitation from non-punishers, who reap the benefits of aggression but do not put themselves at risk for direct counter-aggression from the free-rider. Even expressing anger could communicate an intention to directly punish others oneself—and, hence, disincentivize cooperative punishment from—other observers.
Indirect aggression imposes less immediate costs than does direct aggression, and can be strategically deployed to suppress cheating and other non-cooperative behaviors (Wu, Balliet, and Van Lange 2016). Of course, some of the benefits of directly aggressing (e.g., encouraging the target to treat the aggressor better in the future; Sell, Tooby, and Cosmides 2009) are absent in indirect aggression. Nevertheless, when a moral infraction is not severe enough to warrant the risks associated with direct aggression, indirect aggression can instead be used to recruit others to join in condemnation. This can be an efficient strategy in terms of balancing costs and benefits of punishment (Rockenbach and Milinski 2006), largely by reducing costs of retaliation (Boehm 2009). Based on the data described above, expressions of disgust toward moral violators can advertise disapproval and intentions to coordinate indirect aggression with others (e.g., gossip), but not necessarily to directly aggress. Further, such expressions can also advertise to others that the expresser will not side with the target of the expression in the event that coalitions form to support either side of a dispute.
We believe that these observations fit reasonably well with the nascent investigations into the relationship between disgust toward moral violations and behavioral tendencies. However, they do not explain why disgust— which shows design features for neutralizing pathogenic and sexual threats— would be associated with these types of aggressive behaviors. One possibility is that the phenomenon we presented earlier—that people tend to condemn third parties for engaging in disgust-eliciting behaviors—phylogenetically preceded disgust toward moral violations. If this is the case, then observers
Moralized Disgust versus Disgusting Immorality 21
could use expressions of disgust as cues to intentions to condemn targets of those expressions. In the terminology used earlier, such expressions could be exapted for the benefits described here. Selection could further favor communication systems in which people express disgust toward moral violations bereft of pathogen or sexual content in an effort to advertise intentions to others—that is, this exaptation could be further evolved into a new adaptation. Depending on how coupled the expression system is to the system producing qualia (Strack, Martin and Stepper 1988; cf. Wagenmakers et al. 2016), people could experience similar sensations when viewing moral violations as when viewing pathogen cues.
CONCLUSION
What is the function of moral disgust? Psychologists have encountered multiple barriers in answering this question. As a field, we have disagreed as to whether moral disgust even exists, and hence whether there is even a phenomenon to understand. Those who do contend that moral disgust exists have further disagreed as to types of events that elicit moral disgust. And, perhaps most critically, the functions of moral condemnation in general are opaque (DeScioli and Kurzban 2009, 2013). Here, we’ve suggested that delineating the phenomena that could be referred to as “moral disgust” can give researchers traction in understanding their functions. To do so, we have proposed using the same adaptationist logic that has been so fruitful in understanding pathogen disgust and sexual disgust. Considering the behaviors that are associated with moral disgust and their resulting costs and benefits can spark new empirical investigations, which can in turn resolve some of the mysteries of this aspect of morality.
NOTE
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement numbers StG-2015 680002 and ERC StG-2014–635356.
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CHAPTER XIV
YELLOW BOOTS AND ORANGE BLOSSOMS
N had a knife-play produced such general commotion in Mulberry. Though the motive for a removal was an affair wherewith outsiders seldom concerned themselves, the whole colony thirsted in this distinguished instance to know the wherefore of Bertino’s desire to have his uncle’s life. This was a tidal wave of opportunity for Sara the Frier of Pepper Pods, and splendidly she rode upon it to renewed fortune. For months she had eaten the wormwood of a dishonoured oracle. She had told the people that rival loves dwelt beneath the roof of Casa Di Bello, and that some day grand trouble would be the fruit; but as time wore on and the volcano gave no hint of eruption Sara’s patrons flung the prophecy in her teeth and bought their fried pepper pods of an upstart competitor from the Porta del Carmine of Naples. Now she was able to brush the under side of her chin with the back of her hand when the aforetime scoffers passed, and ask triumphantly, “Who was it, my stupid one, that foretold grand trouble in Casa Di Bello?” No longer could her soothsaying power be doubted, and the morning after the letting of Signor Di Bello’s blood many an old customer, eager for news, returned to Sara’s frying pan, which sizzled all day with the steady rush of trade. In the singsong staccato of Avelino she told all and much to boot of what she knew touching the great scandal. Who but she had gone to Signor Di Bello and told him how Bertino had been seen to kiss the singer, and who but she had seen the stiletto that her words had caused to gleam in his eye? “But it was the other that played the knife,” her listeners would observe, critically. This was Sara’s cue to nod her head mysteriously, say “No matter,” and look wiser than the plaster cast of Dante that brooded, yellow with age and dusty, in the window of Signor Sereno the Undertaker. And no more light could any one in Mulberry shed on the matter, for Juno and Bertino had made excellent work of guarding the secret of their marriage.
Public interest in the episode declined when, after one day of closure, the shutters were taken down and business went on as usual at the Sign of the Wooden Bunch. A new assistant, to take the place of the fugitive Bertino, was on hand; so was Signor Di Bello, who looked not a hair the worse for the inexpert carving of which he had been the subject. While the patrons came and went he sat near the entrance, sprawled in his low chair, preoccupied, but answering with a grunt the many inquiries about his health. The etiquette of Mulberry permits no closer reference than this to removal matters. A subject of vast import and demanding the grocer’s instant attention had sprouted that morning. It was in a letter received from Carolina. He had just reached a conclusion—a fact he betokened by dealing himself a smart slap on the knee—when the form of Juno appeared between him and the sunshine that poured in at the shop door.
“Welcome, welcome, my angel!” he cried, springing up, but quickly pulling a grimace of pain as the wound in the shoulder gave a twinge. “Ah! what good fortune! You are here, and so am I. See what kind of a man is Signor Di Bello! To me a knife in the shoulder is a trifle. Already I am well enough to go with you to the church. Are you ready, mia vita?”
“Wait a few days,” she said, with her frigid calm, “then I will tell you.”
“Porco Diavolo! Wait, wait! Always wait. I tell you I can not wait.”
“Why?”
“I have my reason.”
“What is it?”
“Ah! carina, don’t you know? Well, it is because I can not live without you.” He said it with his upturned eyes pouring forth a sea of adoration. Still it was only half the truth. Had he disclosed the other half he would have told of his sister’s letter saying that she intended to sail for New York within a week. His spirit had quaked at the thought of bringing a wife to Casa Di Bello when the redoubtable Carolina should be on the ground, and the conviction grew upon him that when the moment came he should not be able to muster the
courage needed for such an enterprise. Wherefore he resolved to wed Juno and plant her in Casa Di Bello in advance of Carolina’s reentrance upon the scene.
“You have your reason for not waiting,” she said, impressed not at all by his amatory demonstration. “Good. I have my reason for waiting.”
She walked out of the shop without saying more, leaving him wondering if, after all, he were going to lose her. As she made her way through the hordes of Mulberry she was the target of every eye and tongue. Men gazed at her in admiration and women pelted her with scornful darts, because of her proud bearing as well as her coquetry that had set blood against blood.
“A rogue of a woman,” said a brown daughter of Sicily, fanning the flies from her naked babe.
“Rather. Who knows what she is or where she came from?”
To all of this and much more Juno moved on in haughty disregard. At the mouth of the Alley of the Moon she was greeted with profit-receiving deference by her landlady, Luigia the Garlic Woman, who handed her a letter. Bertino’s writing! Seated on the bed in her darkling cubicle upstairs, she read the missive, which was postmarked Jamaica, Long Island:
C J : Did I kill him? Address Post Office, Jamaica, Long Island. B.
For a moment she sat staring at but not seeing a gaudy print of the Sistine Madonna that hung in a faint shaft of light. Then she sprang up and hurried down the narrow staircase to the restaurant. Seated in the place on the long bench that Signor Di Bello occupied when Bertino broke up their little meeting, she called for writing materials and penned these lines:
C B : Your uncle is very low. Will write soon. J.
As she carried the letter to the red box on the corner her stoical face gave no token of satisfaction felt by reason of the simple but
clean solution of a vexed problem which Bertino’s letter had supplied. Ten minutes later she stood in the doorway of Signor Di Bello’s shop.
“Ah, angelo mio, welcome again!” was his greeting. Then with an air of secrecy: “But sh——! sh——! Not a word here. That boy! His ears are very large and his tongue is long. Every word we said before he heard. Come, let us go for a promenade.”
They crossed to Paradise Park and mounted the broad staircase to the pavilion where the band plays, and took seats in a corner apart from the gabbling women and their swarms of yellow children. Without ado she came to the point:
“My answer is ready. I will be your wife.”
“Joy!” he cried. “But it must be at once. Within the week. The next Feast of Sunday.”
“The Feast of Sunday.”
“Ah, what a wedding it shall be! The finest ever seen in Mulberry. Listen, mia diletta, and I will give you my idea. In an open carriage, with white and purple plumes in the horses’ heads, we shall go to the Church of San Patrizio. Shall it be San Patrizio or San Loretto? For me San Patrizio is most agreeable.”
“For me too,” said Juno. “At San Loretto one finds too many Sicilian pigs.”
“You are right. In the afternoon, then, you wait in the restaurant of Santa Lucia, all ready in your white gown and orange blossoms. Ah, how magnificent you will——”
“Bah!” she interrupted. “White gown and orange blossoms! Where do you think I am to get them? Let me tell you something, signore: I am poor.”
“By the chains of Colombo, then, I am not!” he exclaimed jubilantly. “You shall have them, and the finest in all Grand Street. Here, see what kind of a man your promised spouse is!”
From an inside pocket of his waistcoat he drew a large calfskin wallet bound about many times with stout cord, and took from the plenteous store therein one ten-dollar note. This he handed to Juno with a proud “There my angel.”
“Thank you,” she said faintly, turning over the bill.
“And yellow boots you shall have,” he went on; “just like the ones Signorina Crotelli had last Sunday. I saw them when she and Pietro went up the church steps. Which do you like best, yellow or white boots?”
“I think yellow boots for a bride are very sympathetic,” she answered, folding the bank note and tying it in a corner of her handkerchief. And without a moment’s delay she set off for Grand Street, where the flower of Mulberry does its shopping.
Two hours afterward, her arms heaped with bundles, and every cent of the ten dollars gone, she appeared in the kitchen of her landlady and shocked her with tidings of the nuptials so near at hand.
“Body of the Serpent!” remarked the Garlic Woman. “In the morning you are a woman without hope, and in the evening you come back the promised wife of a rich signore.”
While she shook her head in doubt and suspicion, Juno spread out many yards of purple satin, white lace and pink lining, a wreath of muslin orange blossoms that should give no poisonous odour, a pair of white stockings, and—the sympathetic yellow boots. As the bent crone gazed at the finery her zincky visage lost the hard cast put upon it by a lifetime of penny-splitting bargain and sale. A tender light filled her eye, and she lived again in the sweet days of her youth. Where was the soldier boy that her girlish heart loved? Where the dashing Bersagliere that led her to church in the mountain village? A great mound in northern Africa—the tomb of a whole regiment—could answer. Across the mind of Juno there flashed a thought of her husband and the crime upon which she was about to enter, but the next instant it perished as she snatched up the purple
satin to preserve it from danger, for old Luigia had stained it with a tear.
They plied their needles early and late, and when the Feast of Sunday dawned Juno was ready for the church. All Mulberry knew of the great event in preparation, and made high store of attending the ceremony at the altar; but only the first families of the Torinesi, Milanesi, and Genovesi, and the upper lights of the Calabriani, the Siciliani, and the Napolitani were bidden to the feast at Casa Di Bello. When Angelica received the command to make ready this feast, she declared to Signor Di Bello that a malediction had fallen on the house. To this he returned only a stout guffaw. It was a terrible blow to the cook, who was in full accord with Carolina’s policy of a closed door to wives. Many months she had longed for the return of her mistress, lest this very calamity might betide during her absence. O poor Signorina Carolina! To come back just too late to keep out the Napolitana—the baggage above all others against whom she wished to close the door. She knew it, she knew it! In her dreams she had seen Juno the Superb queening it over her in the kitchen, ordering more garlic in this, more red pepper in that, and making everything fit only for Neapolitan pigs to eat. Maria have mercy, but she must obey. So, taking up her big basket, she had gone forth to market, with face long and voice doleful, and poured into the eager ears of Sara the Frier of Pepper Pods and the group of raven heads always about her, the story of the dreadful rush going on to plant in Casa Di Bello the woman whom Carolina had crossed the seas to keep out.
Though a stone of composure in all the other turns that her adventuring course had taken, Juno lost her calm a little in the haste and flurry of constructing the nuptial gown. As an effect she failed until the last moment to discharge a duty very needful to the success of her plans. The oversight did not occur to her until Sunday afternoon, at the moment when she was seated in the chair of Chiara the Hair Comber, receiving the marvellous wedding coiffure for which that artist was famous. The hair dressing accomplished, Juno lost no time in going to the restaurant and penning these
words, taking great care with the spelling, and making sure that the address, “Post Office, Jamaica, Long Island,” should be correct:
D B : Your uncle died to-day Fly from America. The man-hunters are after you! J.
Then she put on the gorgeous purple gown, and called the Garlic Woman to button the yellow boots. And while the bells of San Patrizio pealed, and the people, dressed in their Sunday clothes, moved toward the church gates, Juno waited—waited for the open carriage with its plumed horses that should bear her to the altar with Signor Di Bello.
CHAPTER XV FAILURE OF BANCA TOMATO
T banking house and steamship office of Signor Tomato had reached the border of a crisis. Inch by inch the despairing padrone had seen his well of profit dry up. No longer did labour contractors come to him for men, and for more than a year he had not taken in a soldo of commission on wages. Even Anselmo the baker, who for two loyal years had bought a four-dollar draft on Naples, took his business to an upstart rival, and people sneered at the sham packages of Italian currency exposed in the little window. The slow but ever-crumbling wreck had left him at last with only the steamship tickets to cling to; but even this spar of hope failed one day when a ship of the Great Imperial International General Navigation Company was stabbed to death off the Banks, and a half dozen of Signor Tomato’s clients returned to Mulberry minus their tin pans, mattresses, and other baggage, but well charged with denunciation of the agent who sold them the trouble. Thereafter it would have been as easy to get home-goers to take passage in a balloon as to book them for the G. I. I. G. N. C. line.
Crushing as it was, this disaster might have been tided over had not a long season of domestic reverses added to the difficulty. For three years there had been no christening party in the tiny parlour back of the nankeen sail, and during that period the bank’s advertisement in the Progresso had appeared without the famous foot line, “Also a baby will be taken to nurse.” The first families of Mulberry had always bid high for Bridget’s offices, and the advent of a new Tomato had never failed to mark an era of prosperity in the bank’s history Bridget’s vogue was greatest among the Neapolitan mothers, who do not hold with the American dairy wife that it is seldom the biggest kine that yield the richest quarts. But psychological reasons were not lacking for the favour in which the
rugged Irish woman was held. In the minds of her patrons was rooted the conviction that for a child of Italy, destined to fight out the battle of life in New York, there could be no better start than the “inflooence” of a nurse of Bridget’s race.
The brave figure she presented at these stages! How all Mulberry stood dazzled as she passed, splendid in the time-honoured costume of the Neapolitan balia! Tradition demanded a deep-plaited vesture of blue silk or crimson satin, which could be hired of any midwife. Bridget always rejoiced when her employer said crimson satin, for that was her favourite as well as Signor Tomato’s. But there were other points of the outfit that gave her little delight. These were the smoothing and shining with pomatum of her crow-black hair, and the sweetening of it with cologne; a gilded comb in her topknot, and pendent therefrom long broad ribbons to match her gown; rosettes in her ears, silver or pearly beads wound in double strings circling her ample neck; rings galore on her chubby fingers. And the skirt! Short enough to show her insteps, white-stockinged in low-cut shoes. Seen from a distance, moving not without pride across Paradise Park, she resembled a huge macaw or other bird of tropical plumage.
Bridget in balia array.
“Troth, it’s the divvil’s own ghinny I am now, and no misthake,” she had told herself more than once when a new engagement found her in balia array. “Phat they’d be sayin’ at home to the loikes iv me I don’ knaw, and may I niver hear. Musha, mother darlint, did y’ iver drame they’d make a daygoe iv yer colleen Biddy? Niver moind, it’s an honest pinny I’m layin’ up agin the rainy day whin there’s not a cint comin’ to the bank.”
But the rainy days had been too many, and the fruits of those golden times were always eaten up. Since the loss of the Great Imperial Company’s ship the tide of prejudice had submerged Signor Tomato. People would not go to him even to exchange a ten-lire note for American coin. Public sentiment vented itself also against the Jack Tar, that steadfast emblem of the bank’s steamship connection which had stood at the door day and night for half a decade. The hand of juvenile Mulberry had ever been against the old sailor, but now he was an infuriating mark, an object of fiercest hatred to the relatives and friends of the passengers who lost their tin pans and mattresses. Passing by, they would draw their knives and slash at his neck, or thrust the point at his heart. Every night brought fresh attacks upon his weather-beaten person with axes and clubs until the banker found his silent partner’s occiput lying in the gutter one morning. This was the last fragment of the head that he had been losing for weeks. Signor Tomato took the incident as an omen of blackest import. An hour later he said to Bridget:
“Guess ees-a come de end-a now. Doan’ know what ees-a goin’ do everybodee. All-a black, so black. What-a good I am? Tell-a me dat. Tink I’m better goin’ put myself off de Bridge. I’m do it, you bet, if I’m not-a love you and lil Pat and Mike and Biddy.”
“That’ll do ye, now,” said Bridget, putting her arm around the little man, who pulled at a black pipe. “That’ll do ye, Dominick Tomah-toe. Off the Bridge is ut? Not while yer own wife’s here to kape hould iv yer coat-tails. Phat’s that sayin’ ye have about the clouds with the silver insides? Sure, I know it in Eetalyun when I hear it, but I can’t say it in English. Phat is it, annyhow?”
He shook his head gravely. “To-day I not-a tink of proverbi. My poor wife, you not-a know how moocha granda troub’ have your Domenico.”
“Arrah, do I not? Mebbe it’s mesilf that knows betther than ye. But don’t be talkin’ iv the Bridge, Dominick dear, whin ye have so many iv thim that love ye. Look at us now, will ye? Here’s mesilf, and”— she went to the door and called—“Pat, Mike, Biddy! Here to your fatther this minute, and show him the frinds he has.”
Three tousled black heads and bright faces came trooping into the bank. Signor and Signora Tomato caught them up and covered them with caresses.
“What’s the matter, mah?” asked Mike, the oldest, looking up into his mother’s tearful eyes.
“Nothin’ at all, Mickey darlint; nothin’ but the warrum weather. Sure yer fatther’s always downhareted wid the hate, and it’s mesilf that do be shweatin’ around the eyes. Away wid yez now; back to yer play, me jewels, but kape forninst the shop.”
“I can’t play any good,” said Mike glumly.
“And why not?”
“’Cause Paddy’s got the roller-skate.”
Bridget swallowed the lump in her throat, and could not help thinking of the affluent past when the babies “was comin’,” and there was a whole pair of roller-skates in the family.
“Never moind, laddie,” she said, “be a good bye, and ye’ll have the handle iv the feather duster to play cat with.”
Mike danced for glee, for here was a joy hitherto tasted only in dreams. Ever since its detachment from the worn-out feathers the handle of the duster had been used as a rod of correction, often raised in warning but rarely brought down upon a naughty Tomato.
“Me want somethin’,” said little Biddy, an eloquent plea in her big black-walnut eyes, while Mike made off with the precious stick.
“Iv coorse ye do, me ruby, and somethin’ foine ye’ll have, be the Lord Alexander! Here, take ye this, and go beyandt to Signory Foli and buy the best bit iv wathermelyun she has on the boord. Moind ye get it ripe, and tell the signory if she gives ye annything else I’ll be down there and pull the false wig off her. Away wid ye now, and come back with the rind.”
She had reached in the window and taken from a very small collection of coins one cent. Her husband witnessed the act of rash extravagance without even a look of reproach, which argued that the
crisis in the bank’s affairs had driven him to an unwonted mood. Presently Biddy bounded into the room bearing a thin watermelon rind on which scarcely a trace of the red remained. Bridget took it, and while her offspring stood as though used to the treatment, rubbed it over her face with loving care, thus affirming the Neapolitan tenet that the watermelon is thrice blessed among fruits, for with it one eats, drinks, and washes the face. The maternal apron applied as a towel, Biddy broke away and made for Paradise Park, where she was soon romping with other tangle-haired youngsters around the band stand.
After a brief silence, during which Pat had shot by the door on the roller skate, Signor Tomato remarked, jerking his thumb toward the headless Jack Tar:
“To-day I am feel lik-a him—no head, no northeen. For God sague, me, I’m go crezzy.”
“Bad luck to the hoodoo, annyhow,” said Bridget, shaking her red fist at the mutilated relic of a once noble though wooden manhood. “It’s the Jonah iv a sailor y’are iver since we bought ye from the Dootchman, sorra the day. Phat am I at all at all, that I didn’t take the axe t’ye long ago? Be the powers, it’s not too late yit, and I’ll do it this minute. Betther the day betther the deed, for there’s not a shtick in the house agin the fire for the dinner soup.”
In rough-and-tumble wrestling fashion she seized the sailor, laid him low, and dragged him over the curb to the roadway. Then she bustled into the bank, and quickly reappeared armed with a rusty axe of long handle. And while Signor Tomato looked on, his face a picture of rising doubt and fluttering hope, and passing women set down loaded baskets from their heads to gaze in voluble wonder, Bridget brought the Jack Tar’s long-suffering career to an ignoble end.
“Mike, Pat, Biddy!” she cried, resting on the axe when the task was finished. “Come you here and carry in the wood.”
She had left no part of the structure intact save the platform and wheels. These she kept for Pat to play with. “It’ll do him for a wagon,”
she reflected; “then Mike can have the shkate all to himsilf.”
The banker’s spirit was utterly broken, else he would never have permitted without verbal protest at least this outrage upon his old silent partner.
“Ees-a one old friend no more,” he mused sadly, looking at his wife and shaking his head. “I’m don’ know eef-a you do right.” Then in his native patter he quoted the Neapolitan saw: “Who breaks pays, but the fragments are his.”
Jack Tar’s ignoble end.
“Glory be!” shouted Bridget. “Sure ye’re betther already. It’s the furst provairb I’m afther havin’ from yer this day Arrah, don’t bother about that owld divvil iv a wooden man. No friend iv the family was he, Dominick dear, and it’s mesilf that knows it. Not a sup iv good luck had we from him in the five year he stood forninst the dure. Wisht now, lave us look for betther toimes now that his bones bes blazin’ under the black pot.”
Scarcely had she finished speaking when the postman stepped up and put a letter in Signor Tomato’s hand—a message that heralded an instant change of fortunes. The banker’s eyes bulged and he grew more and more excited as he read. “Phat is it, annyhow?” asked Bridget, but he was too absorbed to answer. Not till he had come to the end did he tell her the contents. The letter bore the postmark of Jamaica, Long Island, and was dated two days after Bertino’s flight and a week before the day set for the wedding of Juno and Signor Di Bello:
E S T : You remember what I told you touching the bust of the Presidentessa. Well, it is still in Dogana [customhouse]. I send another letter in this, the letter of my friend the sculptor. Oh, I am so sorry! On his letter I have written that they shall give it to you. This will make them give it to you if you want it. I can not pay the tax, and my friend must not wait so long for nothing, because I think it will be a long time before I shall take it, and I have so much trouble, such grand disturbances. He is as fine a sculptor as any in Italy, my word of honour. Now, you take the bust from Dogana and you make money with it, to become his agent in America, like I intended. You do right by my friend and you will not lose. He will make more busts and you can sell them. He is Armando Corrini, of Cardinali, province of Genoa. If you do not reclaim the bust from Dogana, write it to him, because I will not write again to you, and neither you nor any one else will know where I am.
B M .
“Bravissimo!” cried Signor Tomato, the grand possibilities of the writer’s suggestion unfolding before his mind. “My dear wife, I’m blief you right for chop-a de Jack-a Tar. You know de proverbio: When ees-a cast out de devil ees-a come down de angelo.”
“And where’s the angel, I dunno?” asked Bridget.
“Ah, you no see northeen. Ees here, in de lettera. Angel ees-a Bertino Manconi. He send-a good news.”
“Ho-ho! The laddybuck that putt the knife in his uncle. Sure it’s the furst toime iver I knew angels carried stilettos.”
“Wha’ differenza dat mague?” Fired with a new purpose, the banker was himself again, and spoke with spirit. “Maybe he goin’ know wha’ he’s about. For me dat ees-a northeen. Ees-a de statua— de Presidentessa I’m tink about. You know wha’ dat ees? Guess-a not. Well, I’m tell-a you. Ees-a var fine, I’m know. Dees-a Bertino he ees-a been show me de lettera from de Dogana. It say he moost-a pay one hoon-dred and forty dollar. Ah, moost-a be sometheen stupendo. Tink I’m goin’ mague moocha mun by dees-a statua, and de next-a one he mague ees de King of Tammany Hall. How moocha you tink I’m sell-a him? Ah! fine, fine! De Presidentessa, maybe I’m sell-a her to de Presidente. Who know? Guess-a Signor Tomato he ees-a rich-a mahn, he sell-a so many statua to de grandi signori of America.”
The more his eager fancy played about the bust the bigger grew the fortune to which it seemed the stepping stone. From its siren lips there flowed a far-off subtile song, which bade him do and dare, go forth and possess, and by that token end his long night of poverty in a glorious dawn of riches. And with gaining allure came the oft-sung refrain: “The devil cast out, an angel descends; the devil cast out, an angel descends.” Surely it was a fulfilment of that fine proverb, so wise with the wisdom of Naples’s centuries. No eye could see, no ear catch, a plainer truth. The Jack Tar, devil of bad luck, not only cast out, but, grace to the strong arm and inspired axe of Bridget, dead for evermore. And the bust was the descending angel. Yes; he would obey the voice of Heaven’s courier and take the Presidentessa from the customhouse, though it asked every soldo in the window. La Presidentessa! The First Lady of the Land? Dio magnifico! And to him, Domenico Tomato, had fallen the matchless honour of presenting this great work of art to the American people! Not an hour must be lost. To the Dogana at once and release the angel of wealth.
Bridget had the best of reasons for lacking faith in her husband’s business projects, so she set her face and tongue stoutly against this proposed adventure into the field of fine art. To her bread-and-butter view it meant a leap into starvation. She knew he could not meet the customs demand of a hundred and forty dollars save by paying out every piece of money that was on exhibition in the window—by parting with the bank’s entire capital. In stirring figures she pictured the distress and ruin that he was going to court. But to no purpose. From the outset it was clear that her Hibernian substance would not prevail against his Italian shadow. Even while she begged him for the sake of the “childer” to desist, he went about gathering up the money. He untied the sham packages, and from the top of each picked off the one real bank note and threw the sheaf of blank slips under the little counter. Then into a chamois bag he swept the large heaps of coppers, the small heap of silver, and the very few gold coins that were in the collection. “Who nothing dares, nothing does,” he quoted grandly, as he pocketed the money, and made for the door.
“The howly Patrick forgive ye,” said Bridget, following him to the street. “Ivry cint betune yer family and the wolf! Worra, worra, Dominick Tomah-toe, ye’ll rue this day whin they’re singin’ at yer wake.”
“Oh, ees-a better you goin’ shut up,” returned the banker, in a tone meant to be gentle and reassuring. “Ees-a whad for you mague so moocha troub? I’m tell-a you ees-a better you goin’ shut up. Why? ’Cause you not understand de beautiful art-a. Good-a by, my dear wife. When I’m com-a back I’m show you sometheen var fine.”
He went to a rival banker and turned all his Italian money into American. Then he borrowed a push-cart and worked his way at great peril among the trucks and cable cars to the seat of customs. It took all day to unwind the red tape that bound the bust, and the clerks counted it a capital joke to watch the half-frantic little Italian tearing from one window to another in search of the proper authority. Darkness had fallen when, with the big case on his cart, he pushed into Mulberry and stopped before the broken bank. At the door sat
Bridget with her knitting, and Pat, Mike, and Biddy were romping on the sidewalk.
“Ees-a var heavy de Presidentessa,” he said, tapping the box. Bridget sprang up and lent him the aid of her sinewy arms. Full of wonder, the children followed them with their burden into the bank. With a finger on his lip, Signor Tomato turned the key in the lock and covered the window so that outsiders might not look in.
“Ees-a grand secret-a,” he whispered; “moost-a see nobodee.”
By the dim light of an oil lamp he set to work with cold chisel and hammer ripping off the lid of the case. When he had lifted out the precious one, removed the wrapping paper from her face, and set her up on the counter, he stepped back to feast his eyes.
In the first moment of the awful disillusion, it seemed to Bridget that her little man had lost his reason. He had seen portraits of the President’s wife, and after looking steadily a moment the desolate truth darted upon his consciousness that the bust was not of her. It possessed not a single point of likeness. To the turn-up nose of Juno the sculptor had granted no touch of poetry, and it stood forth in all the cruel realism of coldest marble. While the terrified children clung to their mother’s skirts, Signor Tomato thrashed about the shop, beating his temples with loosely closed fists and crying, “Woe is me, woe is me!” He would not be comforted, nor could Bridget quiet him to the degree of telling her the cause of his mad goings-on until she caught him by the arm and commanded that he be a man and tell her his trouble. God had gone back on him, he said, and the world had reached its end. To-morrow there would be no Domenico Tomato.
“Look-a, look-a!” he cried, pointing to the bust tragically. “Dat-a face! O, for God sague! Dat ees-a not de Presidentessa!”
“What! It’s not the Furst Lady iv the Land?”
“No, no; ees-a de last lady, I’m tink. Ees-a lost evrytheen. Misericordia! What I’m do now?”
Bridget thought bitterly of the proverb about the angel descending when the devil is out, but she had no heart just then to twit her
