Moral disgust and imaginative resistance

Abstract

Unlike the emotional responses of fear, horror or anger, the role of moral disgust in our engagement with fiction has not been adequately studied. The main aim of this paper is to examine the role of disgust in moral reasoning in order to establish a basis for tackling some key problems in our engagement with fiction, such as imaginative resistance. Drawing insights from phenomenological accounts, moral disgust is seen as a potentially rational response to our engagement with morally deviant perspectives and narratives. In the first part of the essay, it is argued that moral disgust is caused by the narrative under which an agent organizes, colours, and presents their actions - and, consequently, the value-laden load they attach to those actions. The second part of the essay examines the hypothesis that moral disgust functions as a psychological boundary that limits our ability to imaginatively engage with fiction. The paper concludes by showing how moral disgust relates to certain versions of imaginative resistance that involve first-personal imaginative engagement with the perspective of evil characters in morally deviant fictional worlds.