On Disgust and Moral Judgments: A Review

Abstract

Research on moral judgments has typically focused on how people respond to moral dilemmas. A typical para-digm involves assessing how people evaluate various situ-ations involving harm or justice (e.g., the trolley problem; Thomson, 1986) in order to reach a conclusion regarding the morality of a person or behavior (Björklund, 2004). Although most research conducted in the last century focused on reason as a basis for moral judgments, recent work has pointed towards emotions playing a dominant role in the way people make moral judgments. Most stud-ies focused particularly on the emotion of disgust, claim-ing that it serves a substantial role in moral cognition. The aim of this review is to examine recent studies that have investigated the role of disgust in morality. Although not extensive, the present paper covers an array of issues concerning the role disgust may have in moral judgments. Three different forms of this claim are being differentiated and it is argued that the last claim, apart from being the least appealing, is the weakest of them all. The three forms are as follows: (a) disgust increases the severity of moral judgments, (b) individual differences in the propensity to experience disgust are connected with fluctuation in moral cognition, and (c) disgust cannot be differentiated from anger towards reporting moral transgressions.