Our humanity contains multitudes: Dehumanization is more than overlooking mental capacities

A longstanding conclusion of work on dehumanization is that the denial of humanity facilitates violence, in part by loosening restraints against harming others (1–3). Rai et al. (4) propose that dehumanization only begets instrumental violence. They claim that dehumanization does not facilitate moral violence because moral violence necessitates blame and dehumanization denies the capacity to act intentionally. However, Rai et al. define dehumanization too narrowly—exclusively as the denial of mind—and thus fail to provide a comprehensive test of this hypothesis.

There are many ways to deny humanity. One can deny cognitive capacities, like self-control and rationality, or emotional capacities, like love and embarrassment. Beyond mind denial, one can reduce another to a body part or attribute to others nonhuman essences, likening them to “rabid dogs” or “disgusting pigs.” Although mind denial is a valid indicator of dehumanization, it fails to capture all forms of dehumanization. Humanness involves more than just thinking and feeling; generalizing findings on mind denial to all of dehumanization is therefore erroneous.

Forms of dehumanization that grant minds but attribute nonhuman essences elude the logic put forth by Rai et al. (4), as these subhuman actors possess malevolent intent (5, 6). Their maliciousness may actually motivate their dehumanization and validate—not absolve—their blameworthiness. When people deem the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) “vipers,” they do so not because they see ISIS as lacking intention but precisely because they see its intentional acts as revealing a depraved moral sensibility falling so far below the standards of human civility as to imply an animalistic essence.

Such dehumanization is not an exception to the rule. Several of the most conspicuous instantiations of dehumanization—colonists referring to natives as “savage brutes,” Nazis equating Jews with rats, or Buddhist monks deeming Rohingya Muslims “reincarnated snakes”—were at least as much about actively imbuing targets with despicable attributes of lower animals as they are with ignoring their agency or emotional capacities (7–10). Although not affectively neutral, such dehumanization goes beyond merely expressing negative affect toward the target. Rather, it deems its subjects irredeemably beneath the human pale, stripping them of the moral elevation distinguishing “civilized” humans from lower animals (10). Thus, omitting as Rai et al. (4) do, forms of dehumanization that involve dislike may both sanitize and distort dehumanization. For example, while few would reduce love to extreme liking, excluding liking from the definition of love would suggest love is merely duties and obligations. Similarly, restricting dehumanization exclusively to its affect-free forms obscures dehumanization’s dark specter and links to moral violence.

Considering how the role of dehumanization might differ for instrumental versus moral violence reveals interesting nuance and highlights the failure of past work to sufficiently delineate different classes of outcomes. However, understanding the relationship between dehumanization and violence requires a model that incorporates the full complexities of both dehumanization and violence, identifying the relevant conditions under which different types of dehumanization operate, and to what ends. Through mapping different forms of dehumanization to different classes of outcomes, we might more fully capture the inhumanity in denying humanity.