On InhumanityPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0007
D. Smith
{"title":"Racism","authors":"D. Smith","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter defines the term “racism” and considers the historical trajectory of this phenomenon. Racism is the belief that races exist and that some races are intrinsically superior to others. A person can be a racist, in this sense, even if they do not feel any hostility toward those whom they regard as their racial inferiors. With this definition, the chapter attempts to elaborate on the concept even further. It begins by discussing the meaning of “racial superiority” and how racists believe that each race has an “intrinsic value.” They think that the members of one race are objectively inferior or superior to the members of another just because of their racial identity, and, therefore, each race can be assigned a rank on a hierarchy of value. The idea that some races are superior to others thus results in the idea of a racial hierarchy.","PeriodicalId":332690,"journal":{"name":"On Inhumanity","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131265155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
On InhumanityPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0009
D. Smith
{"title":"Essence","authors":"D. Smith","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses the powerful psychological biases that make possible the dehumanizing impulse. The fact that people sometimes believe that other people who appear human are really less than human illustrates something important about how the human mind works. It shows that we do not think that merely looking human is what makes a being human. Instead, we think of humanness as something deeper that is “inside” of them—something more than the portions of the physical body that meet the eye. This tendency to essentialize kinds of living things helps us get along in the world, even though it is scientifically misleading. But, as the chapter shows, it also produces states of mind that are immensely dangerous and toxic. Acknowledging one's own tendency to essentialize, and remaining vigilant about combatting it, is a crucial step toward resisting dehumanization.","PeriodicalId":332690,"journal":{"name":"On Inhumanity","volume":"75 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130942868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
On InhumanityPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0019
D. Smith
{"title":"Genocide","authors":"D. Smith","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0019","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the exterminationist form of dehumanization—the form of dehumanization that often leads to genocide. One of its most striking features is how repetitive its themes are. With small, local variations, each example seems to be cut from more or less the same cloth. Almost always, the dehumanized group is regarded as an inferior race, and described as resembling predatory or unclean animals. No matter how tiny and vulnerable the persecuted population is, their dehumanizers perceive them as posing an existential threat from which they urgently need to defend themselves. Often, the dehumanizers regard those whom they dehumanize as part of a powerful, shadowy conspiracy that controls world governments and the mass media. And sex is an ever-present element. The dehumanized group is seen as hypersexual and therefore bestial. They are rapists and pedophiles, and they reproduce so rapidly that they will soon replace the dominant group as the majority.","PeriodicalId":332690,"journal":{"name":"On Inhumanity","volume":"149 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133200092","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
On InhumanityPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0004
D. Smith
{"title":"Holocaust","authors":"D. Smith","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses how the Holocaust is a prime example of dehumanization. Indeed, the dehumanization of Jews was a central component of the Nazi program. And to date it represents the most explicit and thoroughly documented example of the dehumanization of a whole people. Much of what we can learn from the Holocaust can be applied to other cases of dehumanization too, because dehumanization always conforms to more or less the same pattern. Of course, there are individual variations, as each incident of dehumanization must be understood against the background of different historical and cultural contexts, and in response to different political forces. But these differences make their striking similarities all the more significant, suggesting that dehumanizing states of mind are grounded in some very general features of human psychology. The chapter shows how easy it is to slip into thinking of others as less than human in part because of how the human mind is configured.","PeriodicalId":332690,"journal":{"name":"On Inhumanity","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116755284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
On InhumanityPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0026
David Livingstone Smith
{"title":"Resisting","authors":"David Livingstone Smith","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0026","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter emphasizes some key points about resisting dehumanization that can be put into practice. It stresses that dehumanization is both political and psychological. Dehumanization must be resisted through political action and by knowing oneself. Moreover, dehumanization must not be confused with other kinds of bias. The chapter argues that it is important to study history to learn about dehumanization, to know that dehumanization comes from outside of us, and to understand that dehumanizing propaganda is usually not about hate. In addition, the chapter asserts that race is a social invention for justifying oppression and that almost any group can become racialized. To conclude, the chapter shows that it is important to be mindful of the fact that most acts of resistance happen in everyday life.","PeriodicalId":332690,"journal":{"name":"On Inhumanity","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127231140","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
On InhumanityPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0014
D. Smith
{"title":"Self-Engineering","authors":"D. Smith","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0014","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter illustrates how, as hypersocial animals, we have strong inhibitions against harming our own kind, but we are also able to recognize that doing harm to others can benefit those who are capable of overcoming their reluctance to performing acts of violence. Here, culture does more than allow us to engineer material artifacts. It also allows us to engineer ourselves. Our knack for culture gives Homo sapiens vastly greater behavioral flexibility than is available to any other species, because it creates conditions that allow us to push back against some of the biological imperatives of human nature itself. Through culture, we can get ourselves to behave in ways that would otherwise be unavailable to us. Among these are ways that we have found to overcome our visceral aversion to performing acts of calculated, instrumental violence against our own kind. The chapter argues that it is thus our feats of self-engineering that have made certain kinds of violence—by far, the most destructive kinds of violence—possible.","PeriodicalId":332690,"journal":{"name":"On Inhumanity","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122324154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
On InhumanityPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0013
D. Smith
{"title":"Morality","authors":"D. Smith","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0013","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter considers multiple theories of dehumanization. More specifically, this chapter aims to examine conflicting understandings of what causes dehumanization or what its function is. Some people think of dehumanization as the failure to recognize the humanity of others. Another popular but incorrect theory is that when people conceive of other people as less than human, this is just an alibi to excuse their cruel and destructive acts. Yet another misleading assumption is the claim that dehumanization promotes “moral disengagement”—a kind of distancing that casts others out from the “universe of moral obligation.” The chapter elaborates on the moral disengagement idea in particular, as it is not precisely correct in theory. After all, the inhibitions that dehumanization undermines are moral ones, and the violence that it unleashes often has an intensely moralistic tone.","PeriodicalId":332690,"journal":{"name":"On Inhumanity","volume":"176 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124330125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
On InhumanityPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0017
D. Smith
{"title":"Dangerous Speech","authors":"D. Smith","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0017","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter is concerned with dangerous speech. Dangerous speech is any form of expression that is likely to cause others to commit or condone acts of violence against some group of people. Not all dangerous speech is dehumanizing speech, however. People often incite or justify violence against a group without encouraging an audience to think of their targets as nonhumans. But this chapter shows that dehumanizing speech is an especially dangerous kind of speech, because of its power to elicit extreme forms of violence. This form of speech dehumanizes indirectly, by causing others to adopt dehumanizing attitudes. The producer of the speech may or may not even share these attitudes.","PeriodicalId":332690,"journal":{"name":"On Inhumanity","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121166483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
On InhumanityPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0015
D. Smith
{"title":"Ideology","authors":"D. Smith","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0015","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter argues that dehumanizing beliefs are ideological beliefs. So, to understand how dehumanization works, and to resist it effectively, the chapter stresses the need for a clear conception of ideology. One popular conception of ideology is that ideologies are beliefs that have the function of fostering oppression. The chapter agrees with and adopts this notion of ideology, because it homes in on something important that we do not have the term for. But to truly understand what ideology is, this chapter pushes the analysis further and looks closely at the two core elements of the definition: the concepts of oppression and function.","PeriodicalId":332690,"journal":{"name":"On Inhumanity","volume":"148 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116338526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
On InhumanityPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0022
D. Smith
{"title":"Monsters","authors":"D. Smith","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190923006.003.0022","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter looks at when humans are made into monsters. When people seek to dehumanize others, they commonly describe the objects of their fear, hatred, and disgust as monsters (or demons, devils, and fiends, which amount to the same thing), either explicitly or implicitly. The chapter considers how, through dehumanization, people come to think of others as monsters. To understand how this happens, the chapter forms a clear idea of what monsters are. It coins the term “metaphysical threat” to describe this dehumanizing phenomenon. If everything that exists is in some sense “natural,” then metaphysically threatening things are disturbingly unnatural. They are lesions in the orderly cosmos.","PeriodicalId":332690,"journal":{"name":"On Inhumanity","volume":"138 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116370567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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