The association between core disgust and moral disgust has been a particularly contentious issue within the emotion literature. Preliminary neurophysiological evidence appeared to support a hybrid theory of the relation between core disgust and moral disgust, suggesting reactivity to bodily moral disgust stimuli is similar to core disgust reaction patterns and reactivity to non-bodily moral disgust stimuli is similar to that of anger.  The aim of this project was to test this theory.  In Study 1, participants viewed and rated emotion video clips to ensure the video clips shown in Study 2 elicited the intended emotions. In Study 2, the selected video clips were shown while EEG and ECG data were collected.  It was hypothesized that there would be similar cerebral asymmetry, heart rate, and heart rate variability patterns between contamination-related core disgust and bodily moral disgust and between anger and non-bodily moral disgust. Although the results of this study did not fully support these hypotheses, preliminary evidence was found to support the hybrid theory of disgust. Based on the participant ratings and observed frontal asymmetry scores, similarities were found amongst contamination-related core disgust and bodily moral disgust and with non-bodily moral disgust and anger. These results warrant further investigation into the disgust construct in order to continue to explore the validity of the hybrid theory of disgust. / Ph. D.

In this dissertation I develop a theory of moral judgment as a natural kind. Instead of analyzing the concept of moral judgment, I develop an empirically grounded theory of its underlying nature. In chapter one I argue that moral judgment is a hybrid state of moral belief and moral emotion. The view is supported by a dual systems model of moral cognition and accounts for the internal but defeasible relationship between moral judgment and motivation. In chapter two I argue that in moral judgment moral norms are conceptualized as social, serious, general, authority-independent and objective. The view is supported by empirical research on the moral/conventional distinction and yields an empirical explanation of the possibility of genuine moral agreement and disagreement. In chapter three I explore whether psychopaths have the capacity for moral judgment, and thus whether they are real life "amoralists," individuals who make moral judgments but lack moral motivation. I argue that psychopaths have an impaired capacity for moral judgment and that prominent internalist accounts of moral judgment have difficulty accounting for psychopaths' peculiar combination of deficits.

The discourse that surrounds and constitutes the post-human emerged as a response to earlier claims of an essential or universal human or human nature. These discussions claim that the human is a discursive construct that emerges from various configurations of nature, embodiment, technology, and culture, configurations that have also been variously shaped by the forces of social history. And in the absence of an essential human figure, post-human discourses suggest that there are no restrictions or limitations on how the human can be reconfigured. This axiom has been extended in light of a plethora of technological reconfigurations and augmentations now potentially available to the human, and claims emerge from within this literature that these new technologies constitute a range of possibilities for future human biological evolution. This thesis questions the assumption contained within these discourses that technological incursions or reconfigurations of the biological human necessarily constitute human biological or human social evolution by discussing the role the evolution theories plays in our understanding of the human, the social, and technology. In this thesis I show that, in a reciprocal process, evolution theory draws metaphors from social institutions and ideologies, while social institutions and ideologies simultaneously draw on metaphors from evolution theory. Through this discussion, I propose a form of evolution literacy; a tool, I argue, is warranted in developing a sophisticated response to changes in both human shape and form. I argue that, as a whole, our understanding of evolution constitutes a metanarrative, a metaphor through which we understand the place of the human within the world; it follows that historical shifts in social paradigms will result in new definitions of evolution. I show that contemporary evolution theory reflects parts of the world as codified informatic systems of associated computational network logic through which the behaviour of participants is predefined according to an evolved or programmed structure. Working from within the discourse of contemporary evolution theory I develop a space through which a version of the post-human figure emerges. I promote this version of the post-human as an Artificial Intelligence computational programme or autonomous agent that, rather than seeking to replace, reduce or deny the human subject, is configured as an exosomatic supplement to and an extension of the biological human.