Moral judgment and disgust with an emphasis on the purity moral foundation

Abstract

This paper reviews the previous work on disgust from the perspective of moral judgment. Shweder et al. (1997) proposed that morality consists of three dimensions: autonomy, community, and divinity. This interpretation of morality serves as one’s rationale and/or standards in moral judgment. Graham et al. (2011) extended Shweder’s idea and developed it as Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). The purity foundation of the MFT corresponds to the divinity dimension of Shweder’s theory and is found to evoke disgust. What kind of behavior people should judge as morally wrong in terms of the purity foundation is shared among ingroup members, which makes them bound together; that is a social function of morality. Accordingly, their moral judgment leads violators to be socially excluded. Although understanding the purity foundation helps researchers clarify how ingroup members are eventually excluded, cultural differences in the concept of purity can exist, such as the unique purity orientation among the Japanese. In addition, this paper addresses such concepts relevant to social exclusion as moralization and moral elevation. The theoretical and practical findings from research on moral judgment will contribute to the better understanding of the mechanism of disgust being evoked and social exclusion being processed.