"A Return to Repugnance"

My former student, Matt Emerson, has a new essay up at Patheos, called "A Return to Repugnance," in which he reflects on his own reactions to the recent stories about "reducing" twins in the womb.  He writes:

. . .  The old arguments—quarreling over Roe, debating about viability, debating the onset of "personhood"—seemed outmatched and outdated. Something had changed, and drastically.

The conviction hit me: We had arrived. We had arrived at the future we were cautioned about, the place where human life had no value except as a field of experimentation, where men and women manufactured life like canned food. Here, in this new place, unborn babies are called "singletons" and willful killing excites all the moral energy of selling a home.

You have to read the article to begin to absorb how bad things have become. . .

Matt then quotes from Leon Kass's famous essay, "The Wisdom of Repugnance":

In crucial cases . . . repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power fully to articulate it. Can anyone really give an argument fully adequate to the horror which is father-daughter incest (even with consent), or having sex with animals, or mutilating a corpse, or eating human flesh, or . . . raping or murdering another human being? Would anybody's failure to give full rational justification for his or her revulsion at these practices make that revulsion ethically suspect? Not at all. On the contrary, we are suspicious of those who think that they can rationalize away our horror, say, by trying to explain the enormity of incest with arguments only about the genetic risks of inbreeding.

I understand the criticism of "yuck factor" arguments:  "If you cannot give a reason, then that must be because your position is a weak one.  After all, that's what we human beings do.  We give reasons -- reasons for or against action."  Martha Nussbaum and others have offered related criticisms of what they regard as unjustified morals legislation, e.g., that they rely on "disgust."  To be sure, that something is unfamiliar, unsettling, provocative, etc., does not mean it's wrong or to-be-proscribed.  And yet, in my view, given that we human beings are the kind of beings that we are, and assuming that we think it matters, morally, that we are the kind of beings that we are, there continues to be, as Kass suggested, some "wisdom" in repugnance.