The Moralisation of Stigma: Moral Foundations, Moral Exclusion and Prejudice Towards Marginalised Groups

Stigma begins with an attribute, condition or identity that is socially marked and devalued; stereotypes, prejudice, status loss, discrimination and other social responses may follow. Yet many stigmatising responses are experienced and defended as moral judgements: targets are positioned as vulnerable and deserving of protection, or as threatening, impure, norm‐violating, irresponsible or undeserving. This conceptual review integrates stigma theory, moral experience, moralisation and Moral Foundations Theory to explain how stigma becomes morally meaningful and subjectively justified. I argue that moral foundations are understood as a vocabulary and set of motivational sensitivities through which stigmatised groups and conditions are morally construed. I propose a situated moralisation framework of stigma organised around three routes: moral inclusion, in which care and fairness bring targets into the circle of moral concern; moral exclusion, in which loyalty, authority and purity frame targets as threats to group boundaries, order, or sacred values; and moral responsibility, in which attributions concerning agency, effort and controllability become moralised through concerns about self‐control, reciprocity and proportionality, giving rise to judgements of blame and deservingness. I also identify boundary conditions concerning target framing, political communication, cultural context, ingroup–outgroup application, measurement and causal direction. The framework clarifies the added value of moral foundations for social–behavioural theory: they help explain not merely who is stigmatised, but how exclusion becomes morally defensible.