Moral judgments of discrimination: The effects of expressive and deliberative disrespect

Why is discrimination morally wrong, and how does political partisanship shape moral judgments of discrimination? Several theories locate the distinctive moral wrongness of discrimination in its disrespectfulness. However, such theories disagree on whether disrespect derives from the deliberation of the discriminating agent, or from the expressive content of the discriminatory act. In a pre-registered vignette-based experiment (N = 1019), we tested the extent to which people are sensitive to deliberation and expressive content in their moral judgments of gender-based workplace discrimination, and whether this sensitivity is moderated by political partisanship. Results suggest that while all participants are sensitive to expressive disrespect, only Independents and Republicans are sensitive to the difference between high and low deliberation-based disrespect.