Emotivism in moral psychology holds that making moral judgements is at
least partly an affective process. Three emotivist hypotheses can be
distinguished: the elicitation hypothesis (that moral transgressions
elicit emotions); the amplification hypothesis (that disgust amplifies
moral judgments); and the moralisation hypothesis (that affect moralises
the non-moral). Even though the moralisation hypothesis is the
strongest and most radical form of emotivism, it has not been
systematically experimentally tested. Most previous studies have used as
stimuli morally wrong actions, and thus they cannot answer whether
disgust is sufficient to moralise an otherwise neutral action. In
Experiment 1 (N = 87) we tested the effect of incidental disgust on morally neutral scenarios, and in Experiment 2 (N = 510)
the differential effect of disgust on neutral and wrong scenarios. The
results did not support either the moralisation or the amplification
hypothesis. Instead, Bayesian analyses provided substantial evidence for
the null hypothesis that incidental disgust does not affect moral
ratings. The results are in line with a recent meta-analysis suggesting
that disgust has no effect on moral ratings.