This paper explores the relationship between eugenics, disability, and dehumanization, with a focus on forms of eugenics beyond Nazi eugenics.

Despite its importance, the phenomenon of dehumanization has been neglected by philosophers. Since its introduction, the term “dehumanization” has come to be used in a variety of ways. In this paper, I use it to denote the psychological stance of conceiving of other human beings as subhuman creatures. I draw on an historical example – Morgan Godwyn's description of 17th century English colonists' dehumanization of African slaves and use this to identify three explanatory desiderata that any satisfactory (...) theory of dehumanization needs to address. I then summarize and criticize the theories of dehumanization developed by Jacques-Philippe Leyens and Nicholas Haslam, focusing on what I take to be their misappropriation of the theory of psychological essentialism, and show that both of these approaches suffer from major difficulties. I finish with an assessment of the degree to which Leyens' and Haslam's theories satisfy the three desiderata mentioned earlier, conclude that they fail to address them, and offer a brief sketch of a more satisfactory approach to understanding dehumanization. (shrink)

Modern buildings do not easily harmonize with other buildings, regardless of whether the latter are themselves modern. This often-observed fact so far has not received a satisfactory explanation. To improve on existing explanations, this article first generalizes an observation of Ortega Y Gasset’s concerning modern fine art, and then develops a metaphysics of styles that is inspired by work in the philosophy of biology. The resulting explanation is that modern architecture is incapable of developing patterns that facilitate harmonizing, because such (...) patterns would humanize buildings, while modern architecture is a homeostatic property cluster with a dehumanizing motive at its core. (shrink)

Maria Kronfeldner’s Preface and Introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization maps the landscape of dehumanization studies. She starts with a brief portrayal of the history of the field. The systematically minded sections that follow guide the reader through the resulting rugged landscape represented in the Handbook’s contributions. Different realizations, levels, forms, and ontological contrasts of dehumanization are distinguished, followed by remarks on the variety of targets of dehumanization. A discussion on valence and emotional aspects is (...) added. Causes, functions, and consequences of dehumanization, and the prospects for reducing or undoing it, are introduced. The systematic overview closes with a discussion of some important theoretical complexities that arise in studying dehumanization. After these systematic sections, the scholarly work on dehumanization gets situated in the broader intellectual landscape of debates about the ‘human’ in the humanities and social sciences. The Introduction ends with some notes on scope, limitations, and intended readership of the Handbook. (shrink)

As costs decline and technology inevitably improves, current trends suggest that artificial intelligence (AI) and a variety of "carebots" will increasingly be adopted in medical care. Medical ethicists have long expressed concerns that such technologies remove the human element from medicine, resulting in dehumanization and depersonalized care. However, we argue that where shame presents a barrier to medical care, it is sometimes ethically permissible and even desirable to deploy AI/carebots because (i) dehumanization in medicine is not always morally (...) wrong, and (ii) dehumanization can sometimes better promote and protect important medical values. Shame is often a consequence of the human-to-human element of medical care and can prevent patients from seeking treatment and from disclosing important information to their healthcare provider. Conditions and treatments that are shame-inducing offer opportunities for introducing AI/carebots in a manner that removes the human element of medicine but does so ethically. We outline numerous examples of shame-inducing interactions and how they are overcome by implementing existing and expected developments of AI/carebot technology that remove the human element from care. (shrink)

This chapter explores the ideological dimension of dehumanization in the context of National Socialism, focusing on the connection between concepts of humanity and dehumanizing images. NS regarded itself as a political revolution, realizing a new concept of humanity. Nazi ideologues undergirded the self-understanding of NS by developing racist anthropologies. I examine two major strands of Nazi ideology, focusing on their diverging strategies of dehumanization, and arguing that they were dependent on different anthropological frameworks. Richard Walther Darré held a (...) naturalistic concept of humanity and advanced biologistic forms of dehumanization. Alfred Rosenberg developed a dualistic anthropology that combined metaphysical and natural features. He dehumanized certain groups of people by reducing them to being human in a natural sense only. Moreover, I aim to show that the key motifs of these racist worldviews were prevalent in the scientific and philosophical debates on anthropology in early-twentieth-century Germany. I thus explore the general orientation of both the naturalistic and the anti-naturalistic strand in anthropological thought, unfold the animalizing tendencies of these views, and emphasize their conformity with the key motifs of Nazi ideology. The case of NS should thus exemplify the dehumanizing potential of anthropological theories. (shrink)

Chapter 14. Andrea Timár engages with literary representations of the experience of perpetrators of dehumanization. Her chapter focuses on perpetrators of dehumanization who do not violate laws of their society (i.e., they are not criminals) but exemplify what Simona Forti, inspired by Hannah Arendt, calls “the normality of evil.” Through the parallel examples of Dezső Kosztolányi’s Anna Édes (1926) and Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing (1950), Timár first explores a possible clash between criminals and perpetrators of (...) class='Hi'>dehumanization, showing literature’s exceptional ability to reveal the gap between ethics and law. Second, she examines novels focalized through perpetrators and the difficult narrative empathy they provoke, arguing that only the critical reading of these novels can make one engage with the potential perpetrator in oneself. As case studies, Timár examines Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which may potentially turn its reader into an accomplice in the process of dehumanization, and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), which puts on critical display the dehumanizing potentials of both aesthetic representation and sympathy as imaginative violence. Third, she reads Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones [Les Bienveillantes, 2006], which can make the reader question, through the polyphony of the voice of its protagonist, the notions of narrative voice and readerly empathy, only to reveal that the difficulty involved in empathizing with perpetrator characters lies not so much in the characters’ being perpetrators, but rather in their being literary characters. Eventually, Timár briefly touches upon the problem of the aesthetic and the comic via Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) to ask whether one can avoid some necessarily dehumanizing aspects of humor. (shrink)

Communities often unite during a crisis, though some cope by ascribing blame or stigmas to those who might be linked to distressing life events. In a preregistered two-wave survey, we evaluated the dehumanization of Asians and Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our first wave revealed dehumanization was prevalent, between 6.1% and 39% of our sample depending on measurement. Compared to non-dehumanizers, people who dehumanized also perceived the virus as less risky to human health and caused less severe (...) consequences for infected people. They were more likely to be ideologically Conservative and believe in conspiracy theories about the virus. We largely replicated the results 1 month later in our second wave. Together, many Americans dehumanize Asians and Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic with related perceptions that the virus is less problematic. Implications and applications for dehumanization theory are discussed. (shrink)

In previous writings, I proposed that we dehumanize others by attributing the essence of a less-than-human creature to them, in order to disable inhibitions against harming them. However, this account is inconsistent with the fact that dehumanizers implicitly, and often explicitly, acknowledge the human status of their victims. I propose that when we dehumanize others, we regard them as simultaneously human and subhuman. Drawing on the work of Ernst Jentsch, Mary Douglas, and Noël Carroll, I argue that the notion of (...) dehumanized people as metaphysically transgressive provides important insights into the distinctive phenomenology of dehumanization. (shrink)

The book is designed to be of interest to women's studies students wishing an introduction to a specifically philosophical analysis of the problem of sex objectification, as well as to philosophers interested in the contemporary moral issues of sexism and sex stereotyping.

This book examines contemporary structural social injustices from a feminist perspective. It asks: what makes oppression, discrimination, and domination wrongful? Is there a single wrongness-making feature of various social injustices that are due to social kind membership? Why is sexist oppression of women wrongful? What does the wrongfulness of patriarchal damage done to women consist in? In thinking about what normatively grounds social injustice, the book puts forward two related views. First, it argues for a paradigm shift in focus away (...) from feminist philosophy that is organized around the gender concept woman, and towards feminist philosophy that is humanist. This is against the following theoretical backdrop: Politically effective feminism requires ways to elucidate how and why patriarchy damages women, and to articulate and defend feminism's critical claims. In order to meet these normative demands an influential theoretical outlook has emerged: for emancipatory purposes feminist philosophers should articulate a thick conception of the gender concept woman around which feminist philosophical work is organized. However, Part I of the book argues that we should resist this move, and that feminist philosophers should reframe their analyses of injustice in humanist terms. Second, the book spells out a humanist alternative to the more prevalent gender-focus in feminist philosophy. This hinges on a notion of dehumanization, which Part II of the book develops. The argued for understanding of dehumanization is used to explicate the wrongness-making feature of social injustices, both in general and of those due to patriarchy. Dehumanization is not another form of injustice-rather, it is that which makes forms of social injustice unjust. The book's second part then provides a regimentation of social injustice from a feminist perspective in order to spell out the specifics of the proposed humanist feminism, and to demonstrate how it improves some non-feminist analyses of injustice too. (shrink)

In this Chapter, Maria Kronfeldner discusses whether psychological essentialism is a necessary part of dehumanization. This involves different elements of essentialism, and a narrow and a broad way of conceptualizing psychological essentialism, the first akin to natural kind thinking, the second based on entitativity. She first presents authors that have connected essentialism with dehumanization. She then introduces the error theory of psychological essentialism regarding the category of the human, and distinguishes different elements of psychological essentialism. On that basis, (...) Kronfeldner connects historical, socio-psychological, and philosophical insights in order to show that although essentialism can act as a catalyst for dehumanization, it is not necessary for it. Examples relate to dehumanization in the context of colonialism and evolutionary thinking, to the history of dehumanizing women from Aristotle to 19th-century craniology, and to contemporary self-dehumanization and ‘lesser mind’ attribution. (shrink)

Martha Nussbaum endorses a kind of humanist feminism, which (for her) involves articulating the notion of human being as a normative ethical concept: once this normative concept is articulated, it can be employed to pick out those modes of treating women that are inappropriate with the view to developing corrective public policies. Contra Nussbaum, Louise Antony argues that human being cannot be defined in a normative sense. For Antony, the only plausible human universals are biological or genetic traits, which lack (...) the required ethical component. This, in Antony’s view, undermines humanist feminism because the prospects of cashing out an ethically normative concept of human being are not good. However, I argue this doesn’t undercut humanist feminism. Instead, feminists can single out inappropriate modes of treating women by developing a politically useful notion of dehumanization. My strategy takes rape to be a paradigm case of dehumanizing treatment and examines what key features make it dehumanizing. These key features, then, can be used to develop a general account of dehumanization. (shrink)

Prisoners involved in the Attica rebellion and in the recent Georgia prison strike have protested their dehumanizing treatment as animals and as slaves. Their critique is crucial for tracing the connections between slavery, abolition, the racialization of crime, and the reinscription of racialized slavery within the US prison system. I argue that, in addition to the dehumanization of prisoners, inmates are further de-animalized when they are held in conditions of intensive confinement such as prolonged solitude or chronic overcrowding. To (...) be de-animalized is to be treated not as a living being who is sustained by its mutual relations with other living and nonliving beings, but rather as a thing to be warehoused and/or exchanged for a profit. The violence of de-animalization affects both human and nonhuman animals held in control prisons, factory farms, laboratories and other sites of intensive confinement. In order to make the connections between these sites, and to develop forms of solidarity appropriate to our shared animality, we need a post-humanist critique of intensive confinement that breaks with the logic of opposition between human and animal, and articulates our constitutive relationality as (inter)corporeal beings. (shrink)

Throughout the darkest moments of human history, evildoers have convinced communities to turn on groups that are regarded as in some way other and, by starting to think of them as less than human, persecute or even eliminate them. We can all recognize the unfathomable evils of dehumanization in slavery, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and the Jim Crow South, but we are not free from its power today. With climate change and political upheaval driving millions of refugees worldwide (...) to leave their homes, we are likely to see more and more of this ugly and persistent phenomenon. What are we to do? Drawing on his deep and wide-ranging knowledge of the history, psychology, and politics of dehumanization, David Livingstone Smith shows us how to recognize it and how to fight back. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to show that pornography dehumanizes women through essentialization. First, I argue that certain acts of subject-essentialization are acts of subject-dehumanization. Second, I demonstrate, by reviewing evidence about the linguistic material that we find in and around pornography, that pornography systematically deploys content that essentializes women in the ways identified as problematic. It follows that pornography dehumanizes women.

Gail Murrow and Richard Murrow offer a novel account of dehumanization, by synthesizing data which suggest that where subject S has a dehumanized view of group G, S‘s neural mechanisms of empathy show a dampened response to the suffering of members of G, and S‘s judgments about the humanity of members of G are largely non-conscious. Here I examine Murrow and Murrow‘s suggestions about how identity-based hate speech bears responsibility for dehumanization in the first place. I identify a (...) distinction between (i) accounts of the nature of the harm effected by identity prejudice, and (ii) accounts of how hate speech contributes to the harms of identity prejudice. I then explain why Murrow and Murrow‘s proposal is more aptly construed as an account of type (i), and explain why accounts of this type, even if they‘re plausible and evidentially well-supported, have limited implications in relation to justifications for anti-hate speech law. (shrink)

Intellectual Disability: Ethics, Dehumanization, and a New Moral Community presents an interdisciplinary exploration of the roots and evolution of the dehumanization of people with intellectual disabilities. Examines the roots of disability ethics from a psychological, philosophical, and educational perspective Presents a coherent, sustained moral perspective in examining the historical dehumanization of people with diminished cognitive abilities Includes a series of narratives and case descriptions to illustrate arguments Reveals the importance of an interdisciplinary understanding of the social construction (...) of intellectual disability. (shrink)

A large part of the contemporary literature on dehumanization is committed to three ideas: (a) dehumanization involves some degree of denial of humanness, (b) such denial is to be comprehended in mental terms, and (c) whatever exact mechanisms underlie the denial of humanness, they belong in the realm of post-perceptual processing. This chapter examines (c) and argues that the awareness of minds might belong to perceptual processing. This paves the way for the possibility that dehumanization might, at (...) least in part, be a perceptual phenomenon, such that dehumanizers visually perceive the dehumanized as exhibiting lesser-than-human minds. It is perhaps unsurprising that the first systematic investigations of dehumanization approached the phenomenon as linked to contexts of war, genocide, extreme hatred, and violence. One guiding hypothesis was that dehumanizers exclude the dehumanized from a moral community of human beings, implicitly conceptualized as displaying distinct individualities and being embedded in caring interpersonal relations. By comprehending the dehumanized as deindividuated entities to which moral norms and considerations of fairness do not apply (Opotow 1990), dehumanizers are able to disengage from moral restrictions and self-sanctions (Bandura 1999). (shrink)

In this chapter I explore the phenomenon of dehumanization in relation to public policy. Using two examples of spectacle lynchings of African Americans, I articulate a conception of dehumanization as the attitude of conceiving of others as subhuman creatures and explain the psychological basis for this phenomenon. I suggest that dehumanization is pertinent to policies concerning hate speech. I address objections to my conception of dehumanization: that dehumanizers implicitly or explicitly acknowledge the humanity of their victims (...) and that dehumanizers regard their victims not merely as animals but also as demons and monsters. I explain how these objections can be met. (shrink)

This paper examines the challenges to critical realism posed by the ways in which the original postmodern sensibility has transformed into various forms of anti-humanism, trans-humanism, and post-humanism. These transformations, largely growing out of poststructuralism, are reinforced by developments in psychology and computer science but also incorporate a new turn toward ontology in alternate forms of realism such as Object-Oriented-Ontology. This paper identifies what is new and what is old in these trends and argues that, while there is something to (...) be learned from them, some of which implicitly and even explicitly borrow from CR, the humanist orientation of CR continues to deserve defense. (shrink)

Translation of: La deshumanización del arte (1924).

Several authors have recently questioned whether dehumanization is a psychological prerequisite of mass violence. This paper argues that the significance of dehumanization in the context of National Socialism can be understood only if its ideological dimension is taken into account. The author concentrates on Alfred Rosenberg’s racist doctrine and shows that Nazi ideology can be read as a political anthropology that grounds both the belief in the German privilege and the dehumanization of the Jews. This anthropological framework (...) combines biological, cultural and metaphysical aspects. Therefore, it cannot be reduced to biologism. This new reading of Nazi ideology supports three general conclusions: First, the author reveals a complex strategy of dehumanization which is not considered in the current psychological debate. Second, the analysis of the ideological mechanism suggests a model of dehumanization that is more plausible than other psychological models. Third, the author provides evidence that this kind of dehumanization had psychological consequences and hence was an important feature of Nazi reality. (shrink)

Julietta Singh challenges the drive toward the mastery over self and others by showing how the forms of self-mastery advocated by anticolonial thinkers like Fanon and Gandhi unintentionally reproduced colonial logic, thereby leading her to argue for a more productive human subjectivity that is not centered on concepts of mastery.

ABSTRACTRecent years have seen an increase in the influx of asylum-seekers in Scandinavia, and in Denmark this has led to ever-tighter immigration control. This article discusses emerging practices of refugee solidarity and resistance to migration policy in Danish civil society in the wake of what has been referred to as the European refugee crisis. To accomplish this purpose, I analyse how participants in Facebook discussions construe topoi and attitudes when facing the ethical dilemma of respecting the law versus showing concern (...) for humans in need, in line with what Foucault, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press) has referred to as ‘ethical self-formation’. This is illustrated through a case study of an incident from September 2015, when a member of a Danish City Council offered private shelter to immigrants on their way to Norway. The incident led to legal proceedings in August 2016 for what the defendant referred to as ‘the offense of helping fellow human beings in need’. The study is informed by Critical Discourse Analysis. Analysing Discourse. Textual analysis for social research. London and New York: Routledge; Wodak, R.. The politics of fear. London and New York: Sage) and governmentality theory. The subject and Power. In H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; Foucault, M.. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78.. New York: Palgrave Macmillan; McIlvenny, P., Klausen, J. Z., & Lindegaard, L. B.. Studies of Discourse and Governmentality. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins). Data include media representations and facebook comments published during 2016. The analytical approach combines topos analysis.. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage; Wodak, R.. The politics of fear. London and New York: Sage) and appraisal analysis to tease out evaluative meaning. (shrink)

The dehumanization of art.--Notes on the novel.--On point of view in the arts.--In search of Goethe from within.--The self and the other.

The present study combines dehumanization research with the concept of organizational trust to examine how employees perceive various types of maltreatment embedded within the organizational practices that form the ethical climate of an organization. With the help of grounded theory methodology, we analyzed 188 employment exit interview transcripts from an ICT subcontracting company. By examining perceived trustworthiness and perceived humanness, we found that dehumanizing employees can deteriorate trust within organizations. The violations found in the empirical material were divided into (...) animalistic and mechanistic forms of dehumanization and linked to perceived integrity and benevolence, respectively. Based on the results, a model describing the link between dehumanization and trust is presented and discussed in relation to the ways in which perceptions of humanness become rooted in practices and affect the basic assumptions underlying ethical organizational behavior. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility is widely viewed as an important feature of contemporary business. It is characterized by the notion that organizations ought to voluntarily recognize and, where possible, practically mitigate the social impacts of its business activities, and that doing so allows organizations to meet the expectations of affected stakeholders. However, CSR initiatives are almost universally tethered to the idea that corporations exist to serve their own performance objectives, and that these will ultimately take precedence over wider macro-social considerations. The (...) present paper proposes that this conception of CSR mirrors the underlying neurological tension between the domains of analytic reasoning and empathic or socioemotional reasoning, and the neural correlates of each. Using the opposing domains hypothesis, it is proposed that CSR, as it is currently conceived of and practiced, is antithetical to social and ethical reasoning at the level of the brain, can increase the scope for dehumanization, and demands calling the ethical dimensions of CSR into question. (shrink)

The first edition was published in 1948 under the title "The Dehumanization of Art, and Notes on the Novel", translated by Helene Weyl from the Spanish original, "La Deshumanizacion del arte e Ideas sobre la novela," published by Revista de Occidente, 1925. In addition to the two title essays, "The Dehumanization of Art" and "Notes on the Novel," this second expanded edition contains three other essays: "In Search of Goethe from Within" (Goethe desde dentro, 1932); "On Point of (...) View in the Arts" (Sobre el punto de vista en las artes, 1924); and "The Self and the Other" (Ensimismamiento y alteración, 1945). (shrink)

Fundamental disagreements in epistemology arise from legitimate differences of interest, not genuine conflict. It is because of such differences that there are three varieties of epistemology: naturalistic, subjective, and what I shall call epistemology-as-logic. All three have been with us at least since Socrates. My chief concern will be with the third, but I must begin with the first and second, which constitute standard epistemology.

Many believe that if the indiscriminate bombings of German cities at the beginning of World War II were necessary for preventing unlimited spread of Nazism, then the bombings were justified. For, the outcome, in which innocent Germans living in Nazi Germany are killed, was not as bad as the outcome in which the Nazis inflict ethnic cleansing and enslavement on a massive scale. Recently, however, Daniel Statman has advanced a powerful case against this type of justification. I aim in this (...) paper to develop an enriched version of consequentialism which rescues the "lesser evil elucidation" of the Exemption. (shrink)

It is too early to judge how 20th century philosophy ended, but its beginning was remarkable. Both Moore’s Principia Ethica and Russell’s Principles of Mathematics appeared in 1903, the first volume of Husserl’s Logical Investigations in 1900-01, and four of William James’s major philosophical books in 1902-09. There was not a significant difference, except in style and temperament, between Anglo-American and European philosophers. The analytic/continental schism came much later. Both Russell and Husserl began as mathematicians. Moore wrote in the preface (...) of Principia that his ethics was closest to Brentano’s. Russell studied and discussed Frege and Meinong in detail. James was admired in Britain and in Europe, influenced Husserl and Wittgenstein, and was the subject of articles by Moore and Russell. (shrink)

In his recent book The Discursive-Material Knot, [Carpentier, N.. The discursive-material Knot: Cyprus in conflict and community media participation. New York: Peter Lang]. Nico Carpentier i...

Five essays, all of them previously published in English but here brought together for the first time, consisting of delightfully overstated--and therefore highly stimulating--observations on art and letters.--V. C. C.