Dehumanization and the Metaphysics of Genocide: A New Theory for Genocide Prevention
Datum
2019-09-18
Autor:innen
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University of Oregon
Zusammenfassung
I argue that dehumanization is a necessary condition of modern genocide, and that preventing dehumanization should be part of efforts to prevent genocide. Unlike other scholarship that addresses this issue, I hold that attending to the moral status and role of nonhuman animals in the process of dehumanization is integral to this effort. Throughout the history of Western philosophy, nonhuman animals have been used to define the human and, in dehumanization, provide the excuse for one group of humans to do violence to another. The absence of a concern for nonhuman animals from both dehumanization and genocide literature generally speaking needs to be rectified if new solutions for these problems are to be developed.
Dehumanization is typically treated as an epistemological problem in which one person or group fails to recognize the humanity of the Other, taking the Other to be a subhuman animal. However, I hold that dehumanization and, subsequently, genocide, are possible because of the metaphysical commitments that render humans and nonhumans as fundamentally different and possessing of different moral and ontological statuses. I point to three metaphysical principles widely accepted within Western thought and culture that contribute to the logic of dehumanization: essentialism, purity, and human exceptionalism. I argue that these principles must be re-evaluated and eventually discarded. Current solutions to dehumanization such as rehumanization and human rights function within this metaphysical framework, maintaining an essential distinction between humans and other animals while retaining the notion that the human is superior to the animal. In response, I contend that we need a different set of metaphysical principles on which to base a practice of ethics and politics that would challenge this human/animal dualism, thereby significantly reducing the possibility of dehumanization and genocide as we know it. To do this, I draw on three metaphysical principles of Native American philosophy: diversity, relatedness, and nonhuman liveliness. I argue that the values of respect, recognition, reciprocity, and consent, which are present in Native American philosophies, stories, and pedagogies, can provide the basis for an ethics of relationality that affirms difference and nonhuman agency rather than sameness and human exceptionalism.
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Schlagwörter
Dehumanization, Genocide, Genocide Prevention, Human/Animal Dualism, Metaphysics, Native American Philosophy