What Makes Moral Disgust Special? An Integrative Functional Review

The role of disgust in moral psychology has been a matter of much controversy and experimentation over the past 20 or so years. We present here an integrative look at the literature, with a focus on experimental work in our lab that has shown differences between elicitors of disgust and anger in moral contexts, with disgust responding more to bodily-moral violations such as incest, and anger responding more to socio-moral violations such as theft. At the same time, new evidence suggests explanations for the sometimes-observed phenomenon of socio-moral disgust: it can react to perceptions of bad character in a person, or it might be a mere expressive strategy to impress others with your own good character. We review other literatures for moral relevance, such as the effects of incidental disgust, existential disgust, and individual differences in disgust. Evidence is currently scarce to clarify whether all forms of moral disgust are the same phenomenon as non-moral disgust, or whether perhaps it is an expressive mask layered on some other emotion. However, it is apparent that bodily-moral disgust has more in common with basic forms of disgust, than do other disgust reactions to moral wrongs. Within the scope of the literature, there is evidence that all four functions of Giner-Sorolla’s (2012) integrative functional theory of emotion (IFT) may be operating, and that their conflicts can help explain some of the paradoxes of disgust.