Question 1: How, if at all, do feelings or emotions influence ethical judgements?

Hints

Your answer may (and probably should) focus on a single feeling or emotion such as disgust.

Please also follow the general instructions for Short Essay Questions.

Lecture Notes

This is not an exhaustive list but may help you if you missed something. The list may grow over the weeks as lectures are added. Consider also using the search function.

The following lectures contain material relevant to answering this question.

Lecture 01

Lecture 02

The following sections contain material relevant to answering this question.

Moral Disengagement: Significance

Moral Intuitions and Emotions: Evidence

Moral Intuitions and Emotions: Evaluating the Evidence

Moral Intuitions and an Affect Heuristic

Reading

If you are following the lecture notes and seminars, you should already know what to read. You do not need to consult this list. This is only for people coming to the assignment without using the lecture notes (not recommended).

Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan (2008)

Sinnott-Armstrong, Young, & Cushman (2010)

Where to Find the Reading?

In some cases the references section already includes a link to help you find the reading.

If there is no link in the references section, start by searching for the title (and, if that fails, by title and authors) on google scholar. If this fails, the library has resources. If those fail, please check first with others on the course. If you still have problems, you may email your seminar tutor.

References

Chapman, H. A., & Anderson, A. K. (2013). Things rank and gross in nature: A review and synthesis of moral disgust. Psychological Bulletin, 139(2), 300–327. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030964

Landy, J. F., & Goodwin, G. P. (2015). Does incidental disgust amplify moral judgment? A meta-analytic review of experimental evidence. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(4), 518–536.

Nichols, S. (2002). Norms with feeling: Towards a psychological account of moral judgment. Cognition, 84(2), 221–236. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(02)00048-3

Piazza, J., Landy, J. F., Chakroff, A., Young, L., & Wasserman, E. (2018). What disgust does and does not do for moral cognition. In N. Strohminger & V. Kumar (Eds.), The moral psychology of disgust (pp. 53–81). Rowman & Littlefield International.

Salvo, G., Ottaviani, C., & Mancini, F. (2025). Bidirectional interplay of disgust and morality: Meta-analytic investigations. Personality and Individual Differences, 236, 113032. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2024.113032

Schnall, S., Haidt, J., Clore, G. L., & Jordan, A. H. (2008). Disgust as Embodied Moral Judgment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(8), 1096–1109. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167208317771

Sinnott-Armstrong, W., Young, L., & Cushman, F. (2010). Moral intuitions. In J. M. Doris, M. P. R. Group, & others (Eds.), The moral psychology handbook (pp. 246–272). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tracy, J. L., Steckler, C. M., & Heltzel, G. (2019). The physiological basis of psychological disgust and moral judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 116(1), 15–32. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000141