AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Why wouldn’t you eat a person? One simple answer for many of us is that cannibalism is morally wrong. Another, perhaps more honest answer, is that it would be gross. In this paper, I show how this disgust response can be rationally related to moral judgements and evaluation. Although disgust and moral judgement are clearly correlated, most modern handlings of disgust treat the truth (or some nearby sense of accuracy/applicability) or falsity of ‘it’s disgusting’ (at least in the sense that applies to food) as being conceptually and essentially unrelated to the truth of any moral evaluation. Any moral judgement that springs from our disgust, then, is simply mistaking a non-moral response for something more meaningful. This paper gives an alternative account. By looking at what aspects of food ‘that’s disgusting’ evaluates, I argue that evaluations of tastes and textures can involve moral – and morally relevant – evaluations.