Dehumanization

From Betweenlines

Curtis Riley
PHIL 111

Dehumanization
Dehumanization is defined as: “To take away humanity, to remove or deny human qualities, characteristics, or attributes.” This is kind of similar to stereotyping, where we go “They’re this” instead of looking at them as an individual. It happens a lot with things like inmates at a prison or soldiers at war where we look at them as almost animals or just the enemy instead of as thinking individuals with their own lives and families.
An example of dehumanization in movies is Creely’s Black Bags in V for Vendetta. When they capture a person, they put a black bag over the person’s face or head. This helps the police that work for him not view them as a person because they can’t see their face. Not perceiving someone as having feelings or emotions is a big step in dehumanization of them. That way the police can beat them without really worrying or feeling bad because they’re not really people, they’re just more criminals. We were asked for this paper what kind of people, or what groups we dehumanize. That’s a really weird and hard question because it’s tough to admit to ourselves that we treat people that way, but I guess at our core we all do. I think one of the groups of people that I dehumanize the most are teachers. I don’t really think about how they feel most of the time because I just kind of put them in their position and that’s all I really think about. It makes it easier to not blame myself for academic failings when they’re put in a position to be blamed for it instead.
I most dehumanize the people who try to hurt my friends though. I guess it’s kind of like soldiers in battle. They become the enemy and that’s all that matters. Instead of how they might feel or what reasons they might have, they get lowered to an animal status and become something that needs to be beaten. Like many issues in ethics, this is something that throws “morals” into question when we think how easily we fall into things like that. Out of habbit and quick anger or just in disgust we take whole groups of people and turn them into non-persons in our heads just to justify how we want to feel about them.
In conclusion, dehumanization is a terrible process by which people avoid guilt and shame for their actions by lowering the status of another person or group of people to a sub-human status. In doing this, they make it OK to beat or mistreat another person. Dehumanization is a bad thing and should be viewed very negatively but it is carried out in prisons, in our armies, and even on a day to day basis by ourselves.