What is the moral value of disgust?
Moral Maze
BBC
4.4 • 623 Ratings
🗓️ 28 August 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The decision of OnlyFans and Instagram to ban the porn star Bonnie Blue, who engaged in sequential sex with more than a thousand men in 12 hours, indicates the strength of the backlash of disapproval to the stunt. The reaction of many people has been what the psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls 'moral bafflement', the idea that most of us instinctively condemn some behaviours without being able to say why they are wrong. Western morality says, “don’t hurt other people”, but Bonnie Blue arguably hurt nobody. This was understood to be safe sex between consenting adults (although the psychological or social impact is harder to determine). Others might form their judgments based on values within sacred texts, but religion is no longer the moral and cultural force it once was.
How much attention should we pay to our knee-jerk sense of right and wrong when judging the actions of other people? Evolutionary psychologists describe how the emotion of disgust was a survival mechanism against the spread of disease. Thus, ritual purity, enforced by religious edict, was vital for the moral and spiritual life of our ancestors. But does disgust still carry moral weight in a modern, secular, and technologically advanced society, or is it merely an evolutionary hangover?
Just because we think something is wrong, how do we know that it is? And do we have the right, as a society, to translate our instinctive disapproval into prohibition? What is the moral value of disgust? Chair: Michal Buerk
Panellists: Ash Sarkar, Tim Stanley, Anne McElvoy and Matthew Taylor.
Witnesses: Stacey Clare, Julie Bindel, Jussi Suikkanen, John Haldane.
Producer: Dan Tierney
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism. |
| 0:09.0 | In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero? |
| 0:16.0 | Simply doing your job, being a decent human being. |
| 0:20.0 | A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by |
| 0:23.1 | their own light and that light is to be recognised by others. The long history of heroism with me, |
| 0:28.6 | Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Good evening. I've not yet seen whether the 70th anniversary edition of the Guinness Book of Records out this week |
| 0:43.1 | includes the internet porn queen Bonnie Blue's latest attempt to catch our attention. |
| 0:48.9 | According to the newspapers, she had sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours. That's more than one every two minutes, not including |
| 0:57.1 | tea breaks. Undoubtedly, a record nobody else comes close. But was it morally wrong? A shudder of |
| 1:04.2 | revulsion certainly went through those same newspapers and through the commentariat at large, |
| 1:09.1 | but it was curious how difficult they found it to explain exactly why it was wrong. |
| 1:14.4 | We live in a post-religious age that elevates personal freedom over notions of purity or decency. |
| 1:20.3 | In sexual matters, consent is the only qualification and harming others the only transgression. |
| 1:26.7 | None of the new rules were broken, but old instincts of |
| 1:30.3 | disgust still linger and well up. The internet channels that champion Bonnie Blue have dropped her, |
| 1:37.1 | she is being, for the moment at least, publicly shamed. How much attention should we pay to our |
| 1:42.5 | knee-jerk sense of right and wrong when judging others? |
| 1:46.0 | Is instinctive disapproval ethically valuable, or an evolutionary hangover, a last twitch of dying religions maybe? |
| 1:54.5 | The morality of disgust, that's our moral maze tonight. |
| 1:57.6 | The panel, Anne McElvoy, executive editor of the news and commentary site Politico, |
| 2:02.2 | Ash Sarkar from the Navarra Media Group, the historian Tim Stanley and Matthew Taylor, |
| 2:07.5 | chief executive of the NHS Confederation. Ash, where do you stand on Bonnie Blue and what she did? |
... |
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