On Disgust and Moral Judgments: A Review

Cristina-Elena Ivan

doi:10.5334/jeps.cq

Abstract

While there is a continuing debate on whether cognitive or emotional mechanisms underlie moral judgments, recent studies have illustrated that emotions—particularly disgust—play a prominent role in moral reasoning. This review explores the role of disgust in moral judgments. I distinguish between three relevant claims regarding its involvement in moral cognition and argue that the least appealing (i.e., disgust is just anger in disguise) is also the one with the least empirical support.

Highlights

The results provided evidence suggesting that violations of purity were the most powerfully connected with disgust; whereas violations of harm were more associated with anger (Cannon et al, 2011)
Most of the research presented here converges on the assumption that disgust does play a substantial role in moral cognition
Most of the studies converge on the facts that disgust increases the severity of moral evaluations (Claim 1), individual differences in the propensity to be experience disgust are connected to differences in moral evaluations (Claim 2), and disgust is not just anger in disguise

Summary

LITERATURE REVIEW

While there is a continuing debate on whether cognitive or emotional mechanisms underlie moral judgments, recent studies have illustrated that emotions, disgust, play a prominent role in moral reasoning. It is important to specify the fact that neither of the manipulations contained suggestions of physical disgust This might be an indication that the connection between disgust sensitivity and moral evaluations might expand beyond the sphere of judgments about physically disgusting violations (Chapman & Anderson, 2013). These findings are inconsistent with those of studies stating that there is a connection between disgust sensitivity and moral judgments (Inbar et al, 2009; Jones & Fitness, 2008) because, as the authors suggested, they “did not significantly predict the degree to which participants found transgressions containing ‘part’ more disgusting than transgressions containing ‘some’” This assumption needs to be tested empirically in order to be confirmed

Discussion

Limitations and Future