1 The Moralization of the Body: Protecting and Expanding the Boundaries of the Self Gabriela Pavarini Simone Schnall University of Cambridge Pavarini, G. & Schnall, S. (2016). The moralization of the body: Protecting and expanding the boundaries of the self. In K. Gray & J. Graham (Eds.), The atlas of moral psychology: Mapping good and evil in the mind. New York: Guilford Abstract: How is morality revealed in the body? Protecting the body coincides with a desire to keep resources for the self, whereas breaking these boundaries (e.g., through physical touch) coincides with a desire to share with others. Introduction Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 163) Human minds reside in fleshy, physical bodies. Concrete and clearly delineated, the body separates internal, private experience from external objects and people. It is the space where awareness simultaneously arises from internally generated streams (e.g., heart rate) and external pathways or the ‘circle around itself’ (e.g., vision, smell). Our senses convey that other beings are exterior to oneself and that our boundaries separate the self from others.