A Social Intuitionist Understanding of Dehumanization

In “Dehumanization, the Problem of Humanity and the Problem of Monstrosity,” David Livingstone Smith defines dehumanization as a process of regarding other humans as condemnable monsters. Though humans are endowed with an inability to commit violent acts towards other species members, dehumanizers can justifiably circumvent this inhibition and use violence to exploit out-group members for in-group gains. A component of this justification for violence concerns morality: dehumanized groups are not stripped of their humanity, but regarded as evil moral agents, deserving of “punishment for their moral failings” in the form of violence. Yet, Smith does not elaborate on how dehumanizers specifically arrive at these moral evaluations of target groups. Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionist model of moral judgment explains how automatic, socially molded moral evaluations of target groups shape dehumanizing attitudes towards those groups. The social intuitionist model’s ‘reasoned persuasion link’ explains the process of epistemic deference observed in dehumanization, the ‘social persuasion link’ explains the voracious spread of dehumanizing attitudes, and the ‘post hoc reasoning link’ defends the existence of parallel representations in the mind of the dehumanizer. The social intuitionist model fortifies Smith’s claim that target groups do not need to be perceived as sub-human to be dehumanized and provides an explanation for how negative moral judgments can diffuse despite insufficient evidence.