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In an interview in Salon, Daniel Kelly, Purdue philosopher and author of “Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust,” discusses the evolution of the emotion from a mediator of protection from toxic foodstuffs to one protecting us from dangerous ideas:

‘Does disgust play a role in creating social inequality? So gays and lesbians shouldn’t be denied the right to marry on the grounds that their so-called disgusting lifestyle undermines the sanctity of marriage?

The groups that are most likely to elicit disgust are often the lowest on the social hierarchy. Women have been made into objects of disgust a lot throughout history. Disgust can be a very powerful rhetorical tool to discredit, undermine or demonize an opponent or a group of people with whom you don’t agree. An easy way to do those things is to portray someone as infecting the integrity of your own social group. Disgust is a really potent emotion, and using it can be pretty rousing and effective because it has an almost subliminal influence on how we think of things.

Why not use it to make discrimination unfashionable?

I argue against disgust ever being used as a social tool, even to get rid of something we all logically agree is morally pernicious. It’s easy to imagine someone arguing that, since rational and calculated arguments haven’t done a lot to change public opinion about racism, maybe we should try portraying racism and racists as disgusting. The powerful influence of this emotion might help push racism to the edge of society or eliminate it altogether, but my response is that we still shouldn’t do it. It’s not ethically appropriate to deliberately depict any group of people as disgusting because disgust makes it very easy to dehumanize, and that would do the very thing we seek to undo.’ (via Salon.com).