This is there any word more on a metepheic with me David Edmonds and me

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is there any word more on aatopoeic than Yuck? Yuck expresses repugnance,

disgust, abhorrence. The thought of a genetically tampered with mouse with a human ear on its back evokes in many people a sense of yuck.

The idea of eating a human corpse draws the same response.

But how much weight should we give these feelings of yuck when we're trying to work out what's right and wrong?

Julian Savalescu is director of Oxford University's U-Hiro Center for Practical Ethics.

Julian Savalescu, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thanks very much. I'm very happy to be here.

The topic we're going to focus on today is Yuck, or the Yuck factor.

Could you just say what that means? What is the yuck factor?

Well everyone's familiar with disgusting taste. You taste something extremely bitter and to go yuck.

But in many cases we see or think about some particular ethical issue and we have exactly

the same discussed response.

So typical examples are when people think about cannibalism, about abortion, for example, incest, or even having sex with animals.

People have intuitive feelings of revulsion or disgust to those sorts of practices. These reactions are pretty widespread.

Is there some biological explanation of why we should have such feelings?

Yeah, many of us are familiar with having discussed reactions.

If you've ever had food poisoning, I had food poisoning from some

sausages once and I always felt sick when I thought about eating sausages and couldn't eat them

for many years. And many of these reactions, these discussed reactions are evolutionarily programmed in order to protect us from toxins

or adverse situations.

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