Reddit reviews Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology)

My dad especially admired Paul Rozin's work. I just checked, and it looks like Rozin has written lots of articles and book chapters and even an encyclopedia entry on disgust, but unfortunately I don't think he's written any complete books on it.

I haven't read it, but William Ian Miller's book The Anatomy of Disgust got excellent reviews. There's a newer, shorter book – Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust by Daniel Kelly that also looks good.

It's a fascinating topic, especially with a political campaign that made anger and disgust its central emotions and now an incoming president who is way-off-the-charts on finding all kinds of things disgusting. He thought Hillary taking a bathroom break was disgusting. Marco Rubio's sweat was disgusting, as was breastfeeding, shaking hands, and – of course! – the blood coming out of Megyn Kelly’s "wherever." (I have found myself really wishing for my father's insights over the past two years! :)

It's also something we need to understand with a subreddit like SO30, where we are trying to make a safe place for discussions of all kinds of sex, from vanilla to very kinky, including some kinks that are absolutely going to disgust some people. Unlike the single topic websites devoted to individual kinks, we don't want to chase away the people who get grossed out by the kinks, but we don't want them chasing other people away either. So it helps to understand how primal and subrational these emotions are.

Hmmm... google is so addictive! :)

Here's a nice article on recycled water: "PROBLEMS TOO DISGUSTING TO SOLVE" -- Apparently 26% of the public doesn't believe that there is ANY standard of purity that would make it acceptable to drink recycled water. This is in spite of the fact that in most places every glass of water from the tap is from a river or reservoir that has been peed and pooped in by birds, fish, and other animals (including human swimmers and boaters). And almost every city that draws water from a river has a water intake that is downstream from other towns' and cities' sewer outflow pipes!

Here's a good book on this topic, I had the author speak to my class about it.

Basically we psychologically tie disgust to morality. People who are cleaner, physically, feel more righteous where as people who are physically dirtier are also more likely to cheat, break rules, etc.

But more to the point of incest, things that can get us ill or are bad for us evolutionary usually disgusting to us. Think rotting food, corpses, certain insects and rodents. Incest likewise is bad for the evolutionary progression of humans due to the likely birth defects so it falls under disgust and therefore most people consider it immoral.

It should be noted as well that 1st cousins marrying actually have a very low chance of birth defects, you really only see issues with brother/sister or father/daughter mother/son.