How to understand abstract concepts has always been a research focus in cognitive linguistics. The viewpoint, which is represented by conceptual metaphor theory and perceptual symbol theory, demonstrates that abstract concepts are acquired and grasped through the experience of perceptual movement of the body, and through the understanding and construction of metaphor. As a typical abstract concept, the acquisition of a moral concept’s meaning is also based on relevant experience. We propose and test a general hypothesis, which we call the metaphorical retrieval hypothesis (MRH). According to this hypothesis, metaphor mapping is bidirectional and feature integration and processing depth affect the retrieval of metaphor association. In Chinese, there are some psychological metaphors in moral concepts and container space, but there are no linguistic metaphors. Therefore, this metaphorical association is weak, which helps us to verify the metaphor retrieval hypothesis. To explore these questions, the metaphorical association between moral concepts and container space is investigated through three experiments in this study.