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6 - Against Comfort: Political Implications of Evading Discomfort
- Edited by Dan Degerman, University of Bristol
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- Book:
- The Politics of Negative Emotions
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 18 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 28 April 2023, pp 111-134
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
Why do some situations make us more uncomfortable than others? We typically think of feelings of discomfort and comfort as highly individualised and subjective. In this chapter, however, I argue that visceral gut feelings like discomfort are not merely private emotional experiences but in a certain sense collective and public. To illustrate this point, consider the following testimony from a young African American man:
‘I feel like I’m disturbing people by just being there. Like, people feel uncomfortable when I walk in. I guess I’ve kind of become numb to it after so many years. Like, this is just my life, and it's just something that I’ve gotten used to, unfortunately.’ (Story of Access, 2018)
Imagine this young man interviewed for a job by three white men. His interviewers appear uncomfortable in his presence. Registering their discomfort, he also begins to feel nervous. If we attribute the tension in the room to individual psychology, we have told only half the story. It is well-established that we find it easier to interact with people who resemble us – for example, in terms of ethnicity, gender, and social and economic class (Danyluck and Page-Gould, 2018). The people with whom we share these characteristics increase our visceral wellbeing and make us comfortable. Emotional synchronising and empathising become easier when we share the same experiences or cultural background (Barrett, 2017; Bloom, 2018). We are drawn to people in whose company we feel comfortable and we avoid situations and people that make us uncomfortable. Feelings of discomfort usher us in certain directions, often without our explicit awareness.
The statement quoted above takes place in the context of the contemporary United States, where perceptions of race play a central role in social interaction. Evidence on implicit biases suggests that we can adapt our thought experiment to any particular social, political and geographical location, varying the example to the social identities of the setting: a woman before an all-male panel of interviewers (gender); or one wearing a hijab before a panel of European Christians or secularists (religion, ethnicity); a first-generation academic from a working class background before a panel of distinguished university professors (class) and many other parameters (appearance, weight, disability, and so on).
8 - Perpetrator Disgust: A Morally Destructive Emotion
- from Part II - Emotional Responses
- Edited by Thomas Brudholm, University of Copenhagen, Johannes Lang
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- Book:
- Emotions and Mass Atrocity
- Published online:
- 16 March 2018
- Print publication:
- 22 March 2018, pp 142-161
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Summary
Philosopher Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic reflects on the disgust felt by some perpetrators in the face of atrocity. This emotional phenomenon, Munch-Jurisic argues, raises fundamental questions about human nature and the foundations of morality. Many philosophers and psychologists have celebrated disgust as an emotion of great moral significance, seeing it as a crucial source of moral judgment as well as moral action. Some advocates of this view interpret the perpetrators’ disgust in moral terms, not only as an embodied aversion to killing, but also as evidence of a biologically grounded moral sensibility. Critics of this interpretation counter that such disgust has nothing to do with morality or any sense of wrongdoing; the perpetrators are simply reacting to the physically repulsive sights, sounds, and smells of mass murder. Both of these interpretations, writes Munch-Jurisic, obscure the ambiguous nature of disgust, which can both signify aversion toward violence and exacerbate it. As a result, we fail to recognize not only how disgust can distort moral judgment, but also how it feeds into the perpetrators’ aggression and inspires some of their worst atrocities. Perpetrator disgust, Munch-Jurisic concludes, is rarely a moral emotion; more often, it is a morally destructive one.