The Catagory "Animal" is Lazy and Explotative.

I thought that Nussbaum's analysis of disgust was very interesting, and I think I agree that disgust is an inadequate emotion to judge right and wrong, independent of other more rational arguments. The same would obviously apply legally; nothing should be criminalized (or legalized) on the basis of disgust alone.

That said, I think there is room to expand on her general point that this has ties to the all to human tenancy to distance ourselves, morally, from animals, or more specifically the notion of "animal" itself.

This tenancy is something we see both in everyday life, ethical debate, and historical record. The rightness and wrongness of acting in certain ways towards another being has is almost always been defined on the basis of whether or not that being is an "animal" or not. Needless to say, whever any human group was/is vilified, was/is disenfranchised, or was/is harmed and shunned... that human group was always ascribed qualities that make them seem more animal like. Take the antisemitism of the Nazi party who described the Jews as "rats" or "maggots" within society. Take the racist vitrol which would have us believe that some ethnic minority is more "apelike" than the rest. Or European fear mongers who harp on about how Muslim immigrants "breed faster" than native Europeans. You can find hundreds of examples.

We do this in reverse as well. We always want to find something that puts us apart from animals and makes us special... something undeniably "human". We once relied on the soul, and now that the concept of the soul is going out of fashion, we turn to other things like our language or reason.

The problem with this, is that even if we declare that all humans have a special quality that makes them deserving of moral respect, and even if we avoid the bigotry of antisemitism and the like, we still fall into the trap of defining an "animal" world which we, as special "humans" can exploit and destroy and harm in whatever way we please.

To animalize another makes it easier to to them harm. This is why bigotry and exploitation always moves eventually to try and label a human in animal terms (and why certain industries which rely of the abuse and exploitation of other species use the excuse "they are just animals").

Disgust may have problems, but I am almost certain that this tenancy to animalize something (be it another species, or another disliked human group) is more likely to move humans to cruelty than disgust can. Yes there are important differences between homo sapiens and other species, but we probably should adopt smarter ways of thought when thinking about the moral status of other beings. Or we fall into that trap.