Moral Maze · BBC Radio 4

What is the moral value of disgust?

August 28, 2025·57 min·4 clips

Julie Bindel argues consent is a 'grudging word' and a smokescreen that makes the men paying for sex invisible.

The first question is blunt. If consent and harm are the usual tests, Bonnie Blue's reported record leaves the panel hunting for moral language that can explain public revulsion without pretending a rule has obviously been broken. Disgust comes in with a bad record. One guest points to Victorian anxieties and old disgust toward gay sex as evidence that revulsion can dress prejudice up as conscience. Tim Stanley pushes back with the evolutionary case. His cockroach example turns into a test of whether disgust can be natural, useful, and morally informative, or whether that gives instinct too much credit. The answer is cautious. Visceral sickness before violence, as with Schindler's List, may tell us something worth hearing, but it does not settle the argument. Sex makes the signal less clean. The debate keeps circling one distinction: is disgust a warning that should start thinking, or a verdict that ends it? The chair keeps tightening the question. Feelings may have a job, but speed is not authority. Professor Haldane's point hangs over the discussion. Anne McElvoy accepts that disgust might help define humanity when it is tied to history and an account of why the emotion makes sense. Julius and Stacey matter here because they are described as building arguments, not just pointing at a shudder. That is where the episode has bite. A shudder cannot judge on its own, but what it notices may still count. Public shame stays unsettled. Disgust leaves neither cleared nor thrown out, only pressed to explain whether it draws moral boundaries or hides inherited prejudice.

As heard by us

A sharp Moral Maze turns disgust from a tabloid reaction into a serious test of moral judgment.

Moral Maze takes the uproar around Bonnie Blue's reported record attempt and turns it into a question about moral judgment: when disgust arrives before an argument, should we trust it, interrogate it, or treat it as inherited noise?

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Why you'd press play

If you want a moral argument that starts with a tabloid shock and ends in first principles.

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