David Livingstone Smith publishes new views on dehumanization in ‘Social Theory and Practice’ journal

David Livingstone Smith, Ph.D., recently published a paper, “Paradoxes of dehumanization,” in the academic journal Social Theory and Practice on his updated views on dehumanization.

The author of Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others (2011), Smith, in previous writings, proposed that people dehumanize others by attributing the essence of a less-than-human creature to them, in order to disable inhibitions against harming them.

In the newly published article, however, Smith contends that this account is inconsistent with the fact that dehumanizers implicitly, and often explicitly, acknowledge the human status of their victims. He proposes that when we dehumanize others, we regard them as simultaneously human and subhuman.

Drawing on the work of Ernst Jentsch (psychology), Mary Douglas (anthropology) and Noël Carroll (philosophy), Smith argues that the notion of dehumanized people as metaphysically transgressive provides important insights into the distinctive phenomenology of dehumanization.