Nov 6
Piercarlo Valdesolo: Moral Harm Needs No Dehumanization
Wed, November 6, 2019
• 4:00pm
- 5:00pm (1h) • Anderson 329
Moral Harm Needs No Dehumanization
Piercarlo Valdesolo, Associate Professor of Psychology, Claremont McKenna College
Research on dehumanization and mind perception combine to tell a clear story about when and why humans commit and endorse violence against others: motivations to harm are facilitated by seeing others as somehow less than human. Through denying victims' mental states, we relax the psychological processes that normally inhibit us from committing or endorsing harm against them. We morally disengage. This talk will present research that complicates this approach by drawing a distinction between two kinds of violence (instrumental and moral), showing how dehumanization facilitates the former but not the latter, and further showing that the endorsement of moral violence often involves perceiving humanness in the mind of those we want to harm.
Event Contact: pjohnson
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