Measuring moral inclusion: A validation of the Inclusion/Exclusion of Other Groups (IEG) scale

Moral exclusion is defined as excluding other individuals or groups from one’s own moral community; i.e. viewing others as lying beyond the boundary within which moral values and rules of justice and fairness apply. On the contrary, the process of moral inclusion involves the extension of social justice to several social groups. Thus, both moral inclusion and exclusion are a pivotal dimension in the study of social inequalities. Although the concept of moral inclusion/exclusion has a history of more than twenty years, research still lacks accurate instruments for measuring it. In this article, a first version of a scale that measures both moral inclusion and exclusion was constructed and validated. The good reliability and correlation indexes found across the samples suggest that IEG is a good measure for tapping into moral exclusion/inclusion symptoms.