I've come to believe that there really is no bedrock in reality. The further we chase materiality, the faster it recedes. But in our macro world of experience, perhaps the closest thing to bedrock (that I have found) is evolution. It is what made us and all other living things. And there is no evidence to suggest that it did so with anything that resembles intention. It is a very mechanical process that basically boils down to something as simple as "whatever works gets reproduced."

So along with all the wonderful qualities we and our animal cousins possess, are also all the troublesome artifacts of evolution's blind creativity. One set of those peculiar artifacts is our ability to be creeped out. It's an emotion. It can easily be disguised as rational thought, but it is instinctual. And it was put there because at some point in our developmental history it served to enhance our survivability and reproducibility. Evolution gave not a single thought to whether it might be perfect for our wellbeing forever. It just did what worked at the time, as it always does.

It's rarely universal in a population, but many of us are creeped out by spiders and snakes, for example. Not hard to understand how evolution might have favored that creep-out. We can be creeped out by precipices that overlook a dangerous drop. Historically we have been especially creeped out by death, and anything that death has touched. I know there are some people who are creeped out by poverty to the point they have no mercy for the poor. "They must be morally inferior" we tell ourselves, "or they wouldn't allow themselves to fall so low!" We'd rather be slave owners than to allow ourselves to be poor.

We're also creeped out by incest or any sexual practice that seems counter to our own presumed wholesomeness. Some of us instinctively bear murderous feelings toward what we perceive as sexual deviancy, and to this day still act out those feelings even though society has chosen to go another way now. In my lifetime I have witnessed the societal shift that went from laughing about murdered gays to legalizing same-sex marriage. Still, the murderous instincts abound. So we can no longer blame culture for these acts. It's now evident that the population at large carries in its DNA instincts that evolution found acceptable, but we choose to reject.

And it's not that evolution is of one mind about these things. The very essence of evolution is conflict. So, as E. O. Wilson says, we are a conflicted species, and our survival depends on it. So we will forever have the responsibility to sort out which instincts to obey and which to override with our ability to make rational decisions, which evolution also gave us. We have the ability to think things through and decide to behave in ways that defy our instincts if we feel it is justified. We can choose to have compassion for fellow humans whose instincts lead them to behaviors our own instincts don't happen to lead us to.

We always have the choice to make moral judgments against another person's "character," or to understand that no two people are working under the same set of evolutionary and environmental (experiential) pressures. If we are "creeped out" by another person's sexual interests, that might not be the most reliable metric by which to make judgments about their character. That person might just be doing what you would do if you had the same DNA and the same life experiences. Maybe a better metric is to start with a basis of compassion for all fellow humans (and, indeed, all living things) and realize that our sense of their creepiness is our problem, not theirs.

If someone is doing something that's illegal, a reasonable response might be to quietly alert the proper authority and let them do what they alone are professionally trained to do, so you can then be free to go about your own business. If you are repeatedly drawn to making a clamor about other people's behavior that doesn't directly concern you, maybe evolution is just playing one of its dirty tricks. Maybe you are suffering from a biologically based creep-out instinct which, while being totally understandable, is not producing a constructive result for yourself or the person it is using as a foil.