Construction and validation of the moral exclusion/inclusion scale

As many scholars have pointed out (Bandura, 1990; Deutsch, 1985; Opotow, 1990; Staub, 1989) our moral values, beliefs and norms apply to people we include within our scope of justice and our moral community. This community may include different levels of people such as family members, friends, neighbours, compatriots, and so on, until it is referred to every person in the world. Thus, if moral exclusion is defined as excluding other individuals or groups from one’s own moral community (Opotow, 1990), moral inclusion – in its more extensive range – refers to the inclusion and extension of social justice to all social groups. That is, the extension of the same rules and norms applied to one’s own ingroup to all the other groups. The aim of the present work is the construction and validation of an instrument that analyze attitudes of moral exclusion and inclusion referred to some target groups. In particular, on the basis of the moral exclusion scale by Passini (2005) and the social distance scale by Bogardus (1933), a moral exclusion/inclusion scale was constructed as composed by 3 seven-point differential semantic items referred to four groups – two groups supposedly close to subjects’ social groups and two far. Results indicate good psychometric properties of the scale.