Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law
Introduction: The Puzzle of Disgust
We begin in the opening pages of the work, where Nussbaum establishes the central question that will animate the entire book: why do so many otherwise reasonable people react to homosexual conduct with passionate aversion, and what role does this emotional reaction play in legal and political arguments?
Nussbaum immediately focuses on a specific phenomenon. She observes that opponents of same-sex marriage and sodomy laws rarely confine themselves to rational arguments about harm, tradition, or religious doctrine. Instead, they frequently invoke a visceral sense of contamination and pollution. For instance, Nussbaum notes that the United States Supreme Court case *Bowers v. Hardwick* (1986), which upheld Georgia’s sodomy law, featured Justice Byron White’s assertion that the claimed right to engage in homosexual sodomy was “at best, facetious.” But she finds the more revealing material in the dissenting arguments and public discourse surrounding the case, where the language of disgust emerges explicitly. “The idea is that disgust already marks some acts and persons as off-limits,” she writes in summary, “and that the law should ratify that marking.” The task of the book is to investigate whether disgust is a reliable moral and legal guide.
Nussbaum clarifies her project from the start. She is not simply writing a history of homophobia or a legal brief for gay rights. She is conducting a philosophical and psychological inquiry into the emotion of disgust itself. What is disgust? What are its objects? How does it operate in human psychology and social life? And crucially, can it ever be a legitimate basis for law and public policy? She previews her answer: disgust is not merely unreliable but actively pernicious, a “profoundly anti-democratic” emotion that has been used throughout history to exclude and stigmatize vulnerable groups. The introduction thus orients the reader toward a systematic dismantling of disgust as a moral emotion, to be replaced by the capacity to recognize the full humanity of others—including their vulnerabilities, needs, and equal dignity.
The introduction matters because it frames the argument as both psychological and political. Nussbaum is not attacking religious morality or conservative family values per se; she is attacking a specific *kind* of emotional reasoning that she believes corrupts public debate and legal judgment. By beginning with disgust, she identifies the enemy within—the gut reaction that masquerades as moral insight but, on examination, proves to be a primitive expulsion mechanism rooted in our animal nature and our terror of mortality.
Chapter One: Disgust and the Body
Nussbaum opens the substantive argument by taking the reader directly into the psychology of disgust. She relies heavily on the empirical work of psychologist Paul Rozin, whose research has mapped the cognitive and emotional architecture of disgust. Rozin’s key finding is that disgust begins as a reaction to the oral incorporation of offensive substances. The core cases of disgust involve things that we might accidentally ingest: rotten meat, feces, vomit, insects, bodily fluids. The primary response is a form of *rejection*—a closing of the mouth, a feeling of nausea, a desire to expel.
“Disgust, as Rozin has argued, is a powerful and primitive emotion, its central objects are reminders of our own animality and mortality.”
From this starting point, Nussbaum explains how disgust extends far beyond its food-related origins. The emotion quickly gets “projected” onto entire categories of people and behaviors. Because humans are uneasy about their own animal nature—the fact that we eat, excrete, bleed, and decay—we tend to project this unease onto others. The disgusting becomes associated with whatever reminds us of the boundaries of our bodies and their permeability. People who are perceived as more animal, more bodily, or more “leaky” become objects of disgust: the poor, women, ethnic minorities, and especially sexual minorities.
Nussbaum presents a detailed account of the cognitive content of disgust. Unlike fear, which is about danger and self-protection, disgust is about contamination and pollution. A disgusting object does not merely threaten harm; it taints, defiles, and degrades whatever it touches. This is why disgust has a contagion structure—once something disgusting touches something else, the second thing becomes disgusting too, even if all visible traces are removed. A roach that walks across a clean plate renders that plate forever spoiled in the mind of the disgust-sensitive person. This feature of disgust makes it particularly dangerous when applied to social groups: once a group is labeled disgusting, the taint can spread to anything associated with them.
Nussbaum then draws the connection to sex. Sexual acts, especially those involving bodily fluids and orifices, are potent triggers for disgust because they directly involve the body’s boundaries and its products. Heterosexual intercourse manages to be “normalized” through ritual, familiarity, and social construction, but homosexual acts—particularly male homosexual acts—strike many people as intrinsically disgusting because they violate deeply internalized norms about what goes where. The disgust reaction is not a rational moral judgment but a pre-reflective gut response. The clarification here is decisive: Nussbaum is not saying that disgust is *never* useful—it clearly helps us avoid spoiled food and disease—but that when it migrates from food avoidance to moral judgment of persons, it becomes a deeply unreliable guide.
Chapter Two: The Politics of Disgust
Having established the psychology of disgust, Nussbaum now examines how this emotion has been deployed in political and legal contexts throughout history. She introduces the concept of projection: the psychological mechanism by which a majority group manages its own anxieties by attributing disgusting qualities to an out-group. This is not merely incidental to political life, she argues, but central to many forms of oppression.
Nussbaum surveys historical examples with striking specificity. She discusses how anti-Semitic propaganda in Nazi Germany depicted Jews as vermin and carriers of disease, using the language of disgust to justify extermination. She examines how American segregationists described African Americans as dirty, bestial, and contaminating, and how the “contamination” logic of disgust underlay laws against interracial marriage and integrated public facilities. She notes that women have historically been described as leaky, polluting, and animal-like, especially in connection with menstruation and childbirth. In each case, the pattern is the same: a dominant group experiences anxiety about its own bodily vulnerability and mortality, projects those anxieties onto a subordinate group, and then uses the resulting disgust to justify exclusion, violence, and legal discrimination.
The chapter then zeroes in on the specific case of homosexuality in American law. Nussbaum provides a close reading of the opinions in *Bowers v. Hardwick*, particularly Justice White’s majority opinion and Chief Justice Burger’s concurrence. White argued that there is no fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy because such a right is not “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” Burger went further, citing the “ancient roots” of prohibitions against homosexual conduct, which he called “an offense of ‘deeper malignity’ than rape.” Nussbaum argues that these opinions are not merely about legal tradition; they are suffused with an unacknowledged logic of disgust. The “malignity” Burger cites is not a rational calculation of harm but a visceral revulsion dressed in legal language. The law, in this view, is simply ratifying what decent people already feel in their guts.
Nussbaum clarifies the political stakes. If disgust is allowed to be a basis for law, then the law becomes a tool for enforcing the emotional prejudices of the majority. This is fundamentally incompatible with liberal democracy, which requires that laws be justified by reasons that all citizens can accept, not by raw emotional reactions. A society that bases its laws on disgust is a society that has not yet learned to treat all citizens as equals. The chapter thus sets up the positive argument to come: what should replace disgust as the foundation for law and moral judgment? The answer, Nussbaum previews, is a political and ethical commitment to the equal dignity of all persons, grounded in the recognition of our shared humanity.
Chapter Three: The Moral Psychology of Disgust
We are now at the heart of Nussbaum’s psychological analysis, where she moves beyond the political consequences of disgust to examine its deep structure as a moral emotion. This chapter seeks to understand what disgust *is* — its cognitive content, its developmental origins, and its relationship to shame and anxiety.
Nussbaum begins by drawing on the work of psychologist Paul Rozin, who has systematically studied disgust as a basic human emotion. Rozin identifies disgust as originally a rejection response to potential contaminants in food, particularly substances from animals or animal bodies. The central feature is contamination sensitivity: something disgusting can make anything it touches disgusting, even if only momentarily or symbolically. As Nussbaum writes, “Disgust involves a sense of ‘one’s own vulnerability to contamination, to the incorporation of the contaminant into the self.'” This property of magical contagion distinguishes disgust from mere distaste or dislike. A fly that touches your food makes the food disgusting, even if you know intellectually that the fly was clean; the contamination is felt as real and irreversible.
The author then argues that disgust is fundamentally about our relationship to our own animality and mortality. The objects that most universally provoke disgust are bodily waste products—feces, urine, vomit, blood, semen—and the bodies of animals, especially insects and rodents. What these have in common is that they remind us that we are animal bodies, subject to decay, permeability, and death. Disgust is a response to our own vulnerability, an attempt to distance ourselves from the fact that we are, ultimately, perishable flesh. Nussbaum writes: “Disgust at the body and its products is a central part of our effort to be human, to transcend our animality.” The disgust reaction is thus not simply a primitive survival mechanism but a deeply symbolic emotion that reflects our existential anxiety about mortality and our desire to be more than mere matter.
This framework allows Nussbaum to connect disgust to the broader project of projection. Because the recognition of our own animality is painful, humans tend to project the disgusting qualities onto other groups of people. By identifying certain groups as the embodiment of animality, we attempt to purify ourselves. Historically, this has manifested in the stigmatization of racial minorities, women, homosexuals, and the poor, who are imagined as dirty, foul-smelling, and animalistic. Nussbaum argues that this psychological mechanism is at the root of many forms of social hierarchy and persecution. The disgust reaction is not a rational moral judgment but a pre-rational, visceral response that can be culturally manipulated to demonize outgroups. She emphasizes that “disgust is a profoundly unreliable guide to moral and political judgment because it is based on a fantasy of human transcendence that is impossible to achieve and that leads us to treat others as subhuman.”
The chapter then turns to the relationship between disgust and shame. Both emotions involve a sense of defectiveness and exposure, but they differ in crucial respects. Shame is about the whole self being judged as inadequate or flawed, often in relation to an ideal. Disgust is more specific: it targets the body and its products as contaminating. However, Nussbaum notes that the two emotions often work together. When we feel disgust at our own bodily functions, we may also feel shame about having a body at all. And when we project disgust onto others, we are simultaneously shaming them for their supposed animality. The chapter concludes by reinforcing that disgust, unlike fear or anger, has no legitimate role in moral or political reasoning because its cognitive content is a fantasy of purity and transcendence that cannot be realized. It is an emotion of denial, not of recognition.
Chapter Four: Disgust and the Law
In this chapter, Nussbaum examines attempts to legalize disgust—to make it the basis for criminal law and social policy. She focuses on the legal philosophy of Lord Devlin and the subsequent debates about legal moralism, arguing that using disgust as a legal foundation is both intellectually indefensible and politically dangerous.
Nussbaum opens by presenting the position of Patrick Devlin, a British judge who famously argued in the 1950s that society has the right to use law to enforce its moral standards, even when no harm to others is involved. Devlin’s argument was a direct response to the Wolfenden Report, which recommended decriminalizing homosexuality in the UK. Devlin claimed that a shared morality is the “ceiling” of society; if it crumbles, society itself will disintegrate. He argued that the law should intervene whenever the “man in the jury box” feels a “reaction of intolerance, indignation, and disgust” at a particular behavior. For Devlin, this feeling of disgust is a legitimate indicator that the behavior threatens the moral fabric of society. As Nussbaum quotes, Devlin wrote that “disgust is a perfectly proper basis for the law,” and that “the man in the jury box” should be the arbiter of what is intolerable.
Nussbaum then presents the counter-argument of H.L.A. Hart, who criticized Devlin’s position as both empirically unsubstantiated and conceptually flawed. Hart argued that it is not enough to show that a majority is disgusted; one must show that the behavior in question actually causes harm. Disgust, Hart maintained, is an irrational emotion that does not provide reasons for legal prohibition. Nussbaum sides with Hart but goes further. She argues that Devlin’s position is not only flawed but dangerous because it gives legal sanction to the psychological mechanisms of projection and stigmatization described in the previous chapter. The “man in the jury box” is exactly the person most likely to project his own anxieties about animality onto a marginalized group. Using disgust as a legal test simply codifies majority prejudice. She writes: “To allow disgust to be a basis for law is to allow the majority to project its anxieties onto a vulnerable minority, and to give that projection the force of law.”
The chapter then examines the use of disgust in specific legal contexts, particularly in laws against sodomy and in the debate over the death penalty. Nussbaum notes that opponents of sodomy laws often invoked disgust to justify their position—they claimed that homosexual acts are “unnatural” and “revolting.” But this, she argues, is precisely the wrong foundation for law. A liberal society should not criminalize behavior simply because the majority finds it disgusting; instead, it should require a showing of harm. Similarly, Nussbaum addresses the role of disgust in arguments for the death penalty. Proponents sometimes argue that certain crimes are so heinous that the perpetrator has become “subhuman,” and that society must express its disgust by eliminating them. Nussbaum challenges this by arguing that the death penalty, like disgust-based law in general, denies the full humanity of the person being judged. It treats the criminal as a contaminant to be expelled, rather than as a fellow human being who remains within the community of moral concern.
Nussbaum concludes the chapter by making a positive case for a harm principle as the only legitimate basis for criminal law. This principle, derived from John Stuart Mill, holds that the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. Disgust, or even moral disapproval, is not sufficient. She acknowledges that the harm principle is not always easy to apply—there are debates about what counts as harm, and about the limits of self-regarding behavior—but it provides a clear standard that rejects the emotional arbitrariness of disgust. The law must treat all citizens as equals, with dignity, and must not criminalize behavior simply because it triggers an emotional response in the majority.
Chapter Five: Disgust and Human Dignity
We are now in the central philosophical chapter of the work, where Nussbaum constructs her positive account of how disgust relates to, and threatens, the concept of human dignity. She has spent the preceding chapters diagnosing disgust as a problematic emotion rooted in anxieties about animality, mortality, and contamination; now she must show why this matters for political morality.
The chapter opens with a direct confrontation: disgust has often been defended as an expression of human dignity, a way of elevating ourselves above our animal nature. Nussbaum quotes the Stoic and Christian traditions that have celebrated disgust as a “healthy” response that keeps us mindful of our rational, spiritual essence. Against this, she argues that disgust actually undermines dignity. The argument proceeds by examining what dignity truly means. Nussbaum draws on the Kantian tradition, but gives it a distinctive reinterpretation: dignity, she says, is not about transcending animality but about being treated as an end, not a means. It is about having the capacity for a life of equal standing with others, a life in which one’s basic human capabilities are respected. The key move is to disconnect dignity from the purity of the body. A person who is incontinent, or who has a disfiguring illness, or who is elderly and frail, is no less human, no less entitled to equal respect. The feeling that such people are “disgusting” is not a moral insight but a refusal to acknowledge their full humanity.
“Disgust, I shall argue, is not a reliable guide to moral judgment, and it is often a subverter of it. It is a response to the presence—or the idea—of the animal, the mortal, the bodily, and it typically involves a desire to distance oneself from that which is seen as contaminating.”
Nussbaum then presents the core of her analysis: disgust functions as a projection of our own anxiety onto a marginalized group. Because we cannot bear the thought of our own decay and animal vulnerability, we displace this anxiety onto others—typically those who are already stigmatized, such as Jews, homosexuals, people with disabilities, or members of lower castes. These groups become symbols of the “animal” that the dominant group wishes to expel from itself. The emotion of disgust toward such groups is thus not a natural reaction to genuine danger but a psychological defense mechanism that serves social hierarchy. She draws on the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and anthropologist Mary Douglas, whose concept of “matter out of place” illuminates how disgust polices boundaries of purity, both physical and social.
The chapter then turns to a devastating critique of the “dignitarian” defense of disgust. Some philosophers, most notably Leon Kass and the President’s Council on Bioethics, have argued that disgust is an expression of “repugnance” that signals something deeply wrong—a violation of human dignity that reason alone cannot capture. Nussbaum dissects this position. She points out that this “wisdom of repugnance” argument is historically and empirically unreliable. Slavery was once considered natural and proper; interracial marriage provoked deep disgust in many; women’s public roles were long considered repulsive. In each case, what felt like a deep moral truth was actually just inherited prejudice. She argues that if we base moral and legal judgments on disgust, we are simply enshrining the biases of the powerful. The emotion has no capacity to distinguish between what is genuinely harmful and what is merely unfamiliar or anxiety-provoking. She illustrates this with examples from recent bioethical debates: disgust at cloning or at certain reproductive technologies tells us nothing about whether they actually violate human dignity.
Nussbaum clarifies what dignity does require, in place of disgust. Drawing again on the capabilities approach she has developed with Amartya Sen, she lists central human capabilities that must be protected: life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses/imagination/thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, relation to other species, play, and control over one’s environment. The key capability for this discussion is affiliation—the ability to live with and toward others, to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others. Disgust, she argues, destroys affiliation. When a group is viewed with disgust, its members cannot engage in social cooperation as equals; they are seen as contaminating, as less than fully human. This is not a theoretical problem but a daily reality for many people. The chapter ends with a powerful summary: disgust cannot serve as a foundation for morality or law. It is an emotion that divides humanity into the pure and the impure, the clean and the defiled, and in doing so it undermines the very equality and reciprocity that democratic citizenship requires.
Chapter Six: Disgust in Practice: Case Studies
The work now moves from theory to practice. Having established the moral and political dangers of disgust, Nussbaum examines concrete historical and contemporary cases where disgust has been used to justify oppression and exclusion. This chapter functions as a series of test cases, demonstrating the patterns she has identified in earlier chapters.
The first case study is anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. Nussbaum argues, drawing on the work of historians like Daniel Goldhagen and Saul Friedländer, that Nazi propaganda deliberately cultivated disgust toward Jews. Jews were depicted as vermin, as diseased, as contaminating the pure Aryan blood. This was not merely hatred but a specific emotional register: the language of disgust—of filth, infection, parasitic infestation—made it possible to treat Jews as subhuman, as something to be eliminated for the sake of public health. The Nuremberg Laws were framed in the language of purity and contamination. Nussbaum emphasizes that this strategy works precisely because disgust bypasses rational argument: it targets a visceral response that makes the group seem dangerous at a pre-rational level. The extermination of the Jews was not an act of rational self-interest but of pathological purification.
The second case study is caste in India. Nussbaum examines the Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) experience in detail. The caste system, she notes, is fundamentally organized around disgust and purity. Upper castes consider Dalits to be “polluting” because of their traditional occupations (cleaning latrines, handling dead animals, leatherwork). This is not merely a social hierarchy but a system of ritual avoidance: upper castes cannot eat with Dalits, touch them, or allow them into temples. The disgust is so deep that it is considered a form of contamination that must be washed away through purification rituals. Nussbaum discusses the legal abolition of untouchability in India’s constitution (Article 17) and the subsequent struggles to enforce it. She highlights the work of B.R. Ambedkar, the Dalit jurist who wrote the constitution, who explicitly argued that disgust was a barrier to equality. Ambedkar urged Dalits to convert to Buddhism to escape the caste system’s logic of purity and pollution. Nussbaum uses this example to show that disgust is not an individual emotion but a structural feature of social systems, embedded in laws, customs, and spaces.
“The emotion of disgust, in short, has been used throughout history to mark certain groups as less than fully human, and to justify their subordination and even their elimination.”
The third case study examines homosexuality and homophobia. Nussbaum traces how disgust toward same-sex relations has been used to justify legal prohibitions, discrimination in housing and employment, and social ostracism. She notes that the emotion is often expressed in terms of “unnatural” acts, of contamination, of disease (especially during the AIDS crisis). Again, the pattern is clear: a group is associated with the animal, the bodily, the impure, and this association is used to deny them equal standing. She discusses the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case _Lawrence v. Texas_ (2003), which struck down sodomy laws. Justice Kennedy’s opinion, she notes, emphasized that such laws “demean the lives of homosexual persons” and are based on “moral disapproval” rather than harm. Nussbaum argues that this decision implicitly rejected disgust as a basis for law, even if it did not say so explicitly. She contrasts this with the dissenting opinions, which drew on disgust and tradition as sufficient grounds for upholding the laws.
The fourth case study is disability and the “creepiness” of bodily difference. Nussbaum examines how people with physical disabilities, especially those that involve visible bodily difference (such as facial disfigurement, missing limbs, or uncontrolled movements), are often met with disgust. She draws on the work of disability scholars like Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, who shows that the reaction is not to the person’s actual capacities but to their bodily “deviance.” The disgust is a barrier to inclusion: it makes people with disabilities feel unwelcome in public spaces, stigmatized, and dehumanized. Nussbaum argues that this is not a natural response but a learned one, shaped by cultural norms about what bodies should look like. She points out that many cultures have worshipped or revered what others find repulsive—for example, the Hindu god Ganesha has an elephant’s head, and the Tibetan Buddhist protector Mahakala has a terrifying form. Disgust is not universal but historically and culturally specific. The chapter concludes by tying these cases together: in each instance, disgust functions as a tool of hierarchy, marking certain groups as “other” and justifying their exclusion from the category of fully human. The task of a just society, Nussbaum argues, is to recognize this pattern and to resist it through education, law, and moral progress.
Conclusion: From Disgust to Humanity
LOCATE: In this final chapter, Nussbaum draws together the threads of her argument to propose a positive vision for how societies can move beyond the politics of disgust toward a more inclusive, dignity-based conception of humanity.
PRESENT: Nussbaum opens the conclusion by restating the book’s central thesis: disgust has been used throughout history as a tool to exclude certain groups from full membership in the human community. She writes that the emotion of disgust, with its roots in our animal nature and our fear of mortality, has been “projected onto vulnerable minorities, who are then treated as though they were contaminants or vermin.” This projection, she argues, is not accidental but systematic, serving to reinforce existing hierarchies of power.
The author then turns to the question of what it would mean to move “from disgust to humanity.” This movement, she explains, requires a fundamental reorientation of our moral and political imagination. It requires us to recognize that our shared vulnerability—our mortality, our bodily functions, our dependence on others—is not something to be denied or projected onto others, but something to be acknowledged as the basis of our common humanity. As Nussbaum puts it, “The truly human person is not one who denies his animality, but one who accepts it with grace and humor, and who extends that acceptance to others.”
Nussbaum identifies the key virtues that would enable this transition. The first is compassion, which she distinguishes from pity. Compassion, she argues, involves recognizing the suffering of another as significant, understanding that it is not deserved, and acknowledging that we ourselves are vulnerable to similar suffering. Unlike disgust, which creates distance and hierarchy, compassion builds bridges of recognition and solidarity. The second virtue is wonder, which Nussbaum presents as the emotional opposite of disgust. Where disgust recoils from difference, wonder approaches it with openness and curiosity. Wonder, she writes, “allows us to see the other as a complex, mysterious, and valuable being, not as a mere source of contamination.”
The third virtue Nussbaum discusses is respect, grounded in the Kantian principle that each human being is an end in themselves, not merely a means. Respect, she argues, requires us to look past the surface features that might trigger disgust—physical appearance, bodily functions, disability, race, or sexuality—and recognize the inherent dignity of every person. This respect is not earned through conformity to social norms; it is owed to every human being simply by virtue of their humanity.
Nussbaum also addresses the practical implications of her argument. She calls for legal reforms that would prohibit discrimination based on disgust-driven prejudices. She advocates for educational programs that would teach children to recognize and resist disgust-based thinking. And she urges cultural change, in which the arts, media, and public discourse would challenge rather than reinforce the stigmatization of marginalized groups. She writes, “The battle against disgust is not won once and for all; it must be fought in every generation, in every institution, in every heart.”
The author concludes by reflecting on the relationship between disgust and justice. A just society, she argues, cannot be built on the foundation of disgust. Disgust, with its visceral rejection of certain bodies and ways of being, leads inevitably to exclusion, inequality, and cruelty. Justice, by contrast, requires us to recognize the full humanity of every person, including those whose bodies, practices, or identities might initially provoke aversion. The task of the just society is to create conditions in which all citizens can live with dignity, free from the stigma and exclusion that disgust imposes.
CLARIFY: Nussbaum’s conclusion is not a simple call for tolerance, but a deeper argument about what it means to be fully human. She is not asking us to suppress our disgust reactions, but to examine them critically and to recognize that they tell us more about our own fears and insecurities than about the people they target. The movement “from disgust to humanity” is a journey of moral and emotional development, both for individuals and for societies. It requires us to replace the defensive, hierarchical logic of disgust with the open, egalitarian logic of compassion, wonder, and respect. This conclusion ties together the psychological, legal, and political dimensions of her argument, showing that the fight against disgust is not merely a matter of personal feeling but a fundamental project of social justice.
Afterword: The Politics of Disgust in the Twenty-First Century
LOCATE: In the afterword to the 2020 edition, Nussbaum reflects on how the dynamics of disgust have manifested in contemporary political movements, particularly the rise of authoritarian populism and the COVID-19 pandemic.
PRESENT: Nussbaum begins the afterword by noting that the political uses of disgust have not diminished since the book’s original publication; if anything, they have intensified. She observes that “the rhetoric of disgust has become a central tool of authoritarian populists around the world,” who use it to target immigrants, religious minorities, and other marginalized groups. This rhetoric, she argues, works by appealing to the same deep-seated fears of contamination and pollution that she examined in the book’s earlier chapters.
The author then examines the specific case of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign in the United States. She notes how Trump repeatedly used disgust-based language to describe immigrants from Mexico and Central America, calling them “rapists” and “animals” who were “poisoning the blood of our country.” This language, Nussbaum argues, was not incidental to Trump’s appeal but central to it. It tapped into the disgust reactions of his followers, who projected their anxieties about economic insecurity, cultural change, and loss of status onto vulnerable outsiders.
Nussbaum also discusses the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study in the politics of disgust. The pandemic, she observes, provided fertile ground for disgust-based thinking, as the fear of contamination naturally heightened people’s sensitivity to potential sources of infection. Some political leaders exploited this fear to target certain groups—for example, blaming the spread of the virus on Chinese people, immigrants, or other minorities. Nussbaum writes that “the pandemic revealed how quickly public health concerns can be transformed into racist and xenophobic scapegoating.”
The author contrasts this negative use of disgust with the positive potential of the pandemic to foster solidarity. She notes that in many communities, the crisis prompted people to recognize their shared vulnerability and to care for one another. This, she argues, is the alternative path: one in which our fear of contamination leads not to exclusion but to cooperation, not to hierarchy but to equal concern for all. She writes, “The virus does not discriminate, but our responses to it can either reinforce or overcome the divisions that disgust creates.”
Nussbaum concludes the afterword by reiterating the book’s core message: the struggle against disgust is a struggle for the very meaning of humanity. In an age of resurgent authoritarianism, pandemic, and climate crisis, the temptation to retreat into disgust-based exclusion is stronger than ever. But the alternative—the path of compassion, wonder, and respect—remains the only foundation for a just and humane society. She ends with a call to action: “We must choose humanity, again and again, in every aspect of our public and private lives.”
CLARIFY: The afterword updates the book’s argument for contemporary circumstances, showing that the dynamics Nussbaum identified in earlier work remain powerfully relevant. The rise of authoritarian populism and the COVID-19 pandemic have both demonstrated how quickly disgust can be weaponized for political ends. But Nussbaum also insists that these same circumstances can be opportunities for moral progress, if we choose to recognize our shared vulnerability rather than projecting it onto others. The afterword thus reinforces the book’s central tension: disgust is a powerful force in human psychology and politics, but it is not inevitable. We have the capacity to choose a different path—one that leads from disgust to humanity.
