David Smith

On my account, dehumanization is the act of conceiving of others as less than human creatures. When this occurs, it is never complete, because those that dehumanize others cannot avoid recognizing their humanness. Consequently, dehumanization involves regarding others as both fully human and fully subhuman beings. Inferences about dehumanizing states of mind are based on interpretations of human behavior. A Davidsonian account of interpretation has it that we interpret behavior in such a manner as to make it maximally coherent, rational, and consistent. In contrast, a Freudian account of interpretation has it that the human mind is largely incoherent, irrational, and inconsistent. The dichotomy between Davidsonian and Freudian hermeneutic strategies accounts for disagreements between realists and skeptics about dehumanization, because of dichotomous interpretations of the testimony of perpetrators and victims. Skepticism about dehumanization often invokes an Objection from Strangeness to call into question such testimony. However, Objections from Strangeness rely on questionable commonsense psychological assumptions.

Sacred leaders are leaders of political movements whose followers, their “true believers,” treat them as messianic or God-like figures. Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the psychological dynamics of religious devotion illuminates true believers’ devotion to their leaders. In Freud’s analysis, religious devotion is a response to helplessness. Sacred leaders also elicit devotion because they also promise deliverance from helplessness. Freud’s analysis does not address the fact that religions amplify helplessness while offering salvation. Fascist rhetoric likewise amplifies helplessness and offers illusory salvation. Hitler appealed emotionally to his audiences by first inducing depression, followed by paranoid terror, and then promising salvation. Donald Trump uses the same rhetorical strategy. The literature on political religions suggests that the decline of religion accounts for the attraction of movements such as National Socialism and MAGA, because they provide secular proxies for near-defunct religions. This explanation is implausible. It is also implausible that followers are attracted to such movements because they are entranced by leaders’ salvationist rhetoric. Rather, people are initially attracted to fascist-style movements for more prosaic (for example, economic) reasons, and the leader’s rhetoric aims at converting them from mere followers into true believers.

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.

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.

We are addressing this letter to the editors of Philosophical Psychology after reading an article they decided to publish in the recent vol. 33, issue 1. The article is by Nathan Cofnas and is entitled “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry” (2020). The purpose of our letter is not to invite Cofnas’s contribution into a broader dialogue, but to respectfully voice our concerns about the decision to publish the manuscript, which, in our opinion, fails to meet a range of academic quality standards usually expected of academic publications.

We are a supremely social species whose ecological success rests largely on our capacity for large-scale cooperation. This high degree of sociality is only possible against a background of immensely powerful inhibitions against performing acts of lethal violence against conspecifics. There are circumstances, however, in which acts of lethal violence are individually or collectively advantageous and attractive. To perform such acts, we must override our inhibitions. This essay argues that this tension causes us to be ambivalent about killing other human beings and that our being so is manifested in the widespread belief, found across cultures and historical epochs, that taking human life contaminates the killer and may pose a threat to the entire community, unless rituals of purification are performed to counteract it. Examples from the Hebrew Bible, the Greco-Roman world, medieval Europe, Africa, and Native America are examined to substantiate this claim. Premodern beliefs, moreover, about the consequences of killing are echoed in the symptoms of “moral injury” described by contemporary psychiatrists treating combat veterans, which suggests that, in defying or disabling our inhibitions against performing acts of lethal violence, we ultimately do violence to ourselves.

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

Representing members of racial minorities as apes or monkeys is a special case of dehumanization and cannot be properly understood outside of a general theory of dehumanization. We argue that to fully understand any particular case of dehumanization it is mandatory to consider the intersection of its psychological, cultural, and political determinants: the psychological component explains the distinctive form of dehumanizing thinking, the cultural component explains the significance of the choice of animal with which members of the dehumanized population are equated, and the political component explains the ideological function of particular cases of dehumanization. We apply analysis to the special case of the simianization of people of African descent.