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Hiding from Humanity : Disgust, shame, and the law

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Disgust is a powerful emotion in the lives of most human beings.² It shapes our intimacies and provides much of the structure of our daily routine, as we wash our bodies, seek privacy for urination and defecation, cleanse ourselves of offending odors with toothbrush and mouthwash, sniff our armpits when nobody is looking, check in the mirror to make sure that no conspicuous snot is caught in our nose-hairs. In many ways our social relations, too, are structured by the disgusting and our multifarious attempts to ward it off. Ways of dealing with repulsive animal substances such as feces, corpses, We have seen some reasons to be particularly mistrustful of disgust as a guide to the legal regulation of conduct. Even though it is evidently a very strong emotion, Leon Kass’s contention that it contains a wisdom that steers us reliably in moral matters is not supported by our analysis of its cognitive content and its social history. Indeed, its propensity for magical thinking and its connection to group-based prejudice and exclusion make it look particularly unreliable. Devlin’s position is, so far, less damaged by our analysis, because he grants that disgust is based on social norms. He does not Like disgust, shame is a ubiquitous emotion in social life. When I was a child one of my relatives, fond of advice giving, used to say to all children, “Soar with your strengths and learn to cover your weaknesses.” And of course we all do learn to cover our weaknesses as we go through life, whether by compensating for them with other strengths, by training to overcome them, or by avoiding situations in which they will inevitably manifest themselves. Most of us, most of the time, try to appear “normal,” a notion whose strangeness I shall later discuss, but whose

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Availability

KP.VII.2.000031

KP VII.2 NUS h

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Detail Information

Series Title

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Call Number

KP VII.2 NUS h

Publisher

New Jersey : Princeton University Press., 2004

Collation

xv, 413 hlm. ; 24 cm.

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

0-691-09526-4

Classification

KP VII.2

Content Type

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Media Type

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Carrier Type

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Edition

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Subject(s)

Hukum
Humanities

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