Dehumanization and the Victims of Genocide (Draft)
Krista Thomason, Swarthmore College
Attempting to explain and understand how average people—people with no history of or
propensity to violence—are able to commit genocidal acts has been the subject of discussions in a
variety of academic fields including history, psychology, and philosophy. One of the most common
emergent themes in these varied accounts is the distance that the perpetrators build between
themselves and their victims. This process is referred to as ‘othering’ or ‘dehumanization.’ Although
dehumanization is not the only force that allows ordinary people to commit genocide, if the
perpetrators fail to regard their victims as fellow humans, this failure seems to explain why they are
able to kill in spite of their lack of propensity to violence.
My aim in this paper is to better understand precisely what dehumanization entails. At first
glance, dehumanization seems obvious: what else is there to know other than that the perpetrators
no longer see their victims as human? Like many aspects of genocide, however, what seems obvious
on the surface admits of further questions. As Berel Lang has pointed out, although everyone agrees
that genocide is morally wrong, we have no good account of its special moral wrongness—why is it
worse than war or other kinds of mass killing?i My contention is that dehumanization needs a similar
examination. In this paper, I will call into question one influential account of dehumanization,
namely James Waller’s “psychological construction of the Other” (2002, 196). Here I will argue that
there is a tension in Waller’s account of dehumanization that makes it ultimately unsatisfactory.
Waller suggests that perpetrators both (a) justify their actions using moral trappings and (b) see their
victims as nonhuman. I will argue that these two processes undermine one another, which makes the
account internally inconsistent. I will conclude by suggesting possible ways of addressing this
inconsistency, which will hopefully shed light on the process of dehumanization more generally.
1.
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In Becoming Evil, James Waller offers one of the most recent and comprehensive accounts of
dehumanization. Waller argues that dehumanization of victims is one of the “proximate
constructions” that allows people to commit genocide.ii Proximate constructions influence behavior
in an immediate way, and according to Waller they help us explain how ordinary people are able to
perform genocidal acts.iii One of these proximate influences is dehumanization or “psychological
construction of the Other.”iv Waller’s account of dehumanization has three elements: “us-them
thinking, moral disengagement, and blaming the victims.”v The focus of my discussion will be on
the last two aspects: moral disengagement and blaming the victims.
Dehumanization, on Waller’s view, requires moral disengagement, which is “a process of
detachment by which some individuals or groups are placed outside the boundary within which
moral values, rules, and considerations of fairness apply.”vi One of the ways this detachment process
happens is by comparing the victims to nonhuman creatures—either subhuman beings like animals
and insects or to inhuman creatures like monsters and demons.vii Additionally, victims of genocide
are often forced to live in inhumane conditions: they are kept prisoner, stripped naked, forced to
urinate and defecate on themselves, and starved. These strategies make victims physically appear as
“less than full person[s].”viii Widely-distributed propaganda then reinforces these images of the
victims as nonhuman.ix Killing and torture are likewise euphemistically labeled: both the Nazis and
the Khmer Rouge used terms like “cleansing” in place of “killing.”x If the victims are seen by the
perpetrators as not really human, killing them is supposed to be easier. Since there is allegedly more
moral distance between humans and nonhumans, killing nonhumans is not as challenging as killing
humans.
The other element of dehumanization on Waller’s account is blaming the victims.
Perpetrators will find it easier to kill if the can convince themselves that victims deserve their
suffering.xi According to Waller, victim-blaming results from the common tendency for humans to
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believe in a just world: if the victims have done something to earn their suffering, then perpetrators
will feel less hesitation about doling out just deserts.xii Victims can be blamed with some act or set of
acts that brings about their suffering. One of the tenets of Nazi ideology, for example, was that Jews
were part of some complex international conspiracy and thus deserved to be exposed and brought
down.xiii Similarly, if victims can be painted as the “enemy” then their deaths can be justified in
terms of self-defense or in the context of winning a larger “war.” The Khmer Rouge encouraged
their prisoners to look for enemies everywhere; they would routinely ask whether individuals would
be willing to kill their families if it turned out their families were “traitors.”xiv On Waller’s account, if
victims are enemies or if their suffering is a kind of punishment for misdeeds, then it is easier for
others to kill them. Both moral disengagement and victim-blaming, then, are meant to explain how
ordinary people are able to participate in genocide and mass killing.
2.
From the perspective of moral philosophy, Waller’s claims are puzzling. According to Waller,
moral disengagement and victim-blaming are supposed to work in concert together to facilitate the
commission of genocidal acts. The trouble is that these two states of mind appear to undermine
rather than complement one another. Blaming others for what happens to them presupposes that
we regard them as responsible for their actions. Blaming the victims for their suffering thus requires
the opposite of moral disengagement: in order to blame someone we must see that person as a
member of the moral community. As such, we cannot both blame someone and regard her as
subhuman or nonhuman.
The nature of blame and responsibility has been a long-standing interest in moral
philosophy. Strawson’s paper, “Freedom and Resentment,” is a watershed in the discussion. Strawson
argues that blame presupposes that we see those to whom it is directed as responsible agents.xv On
Strawson’s view, blame is a “participant attitude:” it is an attitude that we have toward those we see
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as regular members of the moral community.xvi To illustrate, Strawson asks us to imagine the various
kinds of excuses that might mitigate blame. Suppose someone pushes me down on the sidewalk.
Someone might excuse her behavior by saying, “Don’t blame her; she was running to the hospital.”
Alternatively, someone might offer the following excuse: “Don’t blame her; she is in the midst of a
psychotic break.” As Strawson points out, while the first excuse mitigates blame, the second excuse
nullifies blame. Instead of taking a participant attitude toward the person in the midst of a psychotic
break, we take what Strawson calls an “objective attitude.”xvii The objective attitude precludes the
responses that are typically associated with the participant attitude, which would include blame. On
Strawson’s view, the distinction between the participant attitude and the objective attitude explains
why we do not blame non-responsible actors, such as people suffering from severe mental illness,
very young children, or nonhuman animals. We can, of course, experience a range of other
emotions toward these groups, but we do not blame them because we do not see them as full
participants in the moral community.xviii Strawson’s account of blame is now widely accepted among
moral philosophers.xix
To use Strawson’s terms, then, we might say that when perpetrators dehumanize their
victims, they take up an objective attitude toward them rather than a participant attitude. But if
Strawson is right, blaming the victims for their own suffering would require taking up a participant
attitude toward them. It would require seeing the victim as part of the moral community and thus
subject to moral norms and responses. The participant attitude and the objective attitude are thus in
fundamental tension with one another. We cannot both see someone as subhuman while at the same
time blaming her for her own suffering. From the perspective of moral philosophy, there is an
internal inconsistency in Waller’s account of dehumanization.
One might be tempted to respond that the mentality of the perpetrator of genocidal acts
should meet no expectations of stability. Why should we assume that such a complex psychology
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should be consistent? It may be too strict to assume that those who are able to perpetrate genocide
must meet the standards of reasonability and rationality that we attribute to everyday actors, but I
think it would be a mistake to conclude from the instability or complexity of such a mindset that it
is thus entirely inconsistent, confused, or beyond the scope of rationality altogether. Much of the
work done on evil in genocide studies has indeed argued that perpetrators of genocide are not moral
monsters, but ordinary human beings with ordinary human psychology.xx If we hold that those who
kill in genocide are indeed ordinary humans then we cannot simultaneously maintain that their
psychologies are hopelessly inconsistent. As such, we should reconsider accounts of the psychology
that contain fundamental tensions of the sort that Waller’s appears to have.
3.
If there is a tension between moral disengagement and blaming the victims, then one of
these elements must be reexamined. Here I will argue that moral disengagement is not what it
appears to be. Recall that moral disengagement involves coming to see the victims of genocide as
subhuman or nonhuman, and this outside the realm of moral concern. But what precisely does it
mean to “see” another human as nonhuman?
The first thing we notice is that seeing someone as subhuman or nonhuman cannot be a
literal equivocation. It cannot be the case that perpetrators literally believe that their victims are
nonhuman because that literal belief would preclude their actions as wicked. If the perpetrators
literally believed that they were killing rats, for example, rather than humans, their actions would be
tragically mistaken, but not evil. They would be morally equivalent to someone accidentally shooting
a neighbor because she believed the neighbor was an intruder. Although it is important to
understand that the people who commit genocidal acts need not be monsters in order to kill, we
must take care not to see their actions as simply mistaken. Perpetrators wrongly view their victims as
nonhuman. If they wrongly see their victims as nonhuman, when might then conclude that although
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perpetrators know their victims are indeed humans, the regard they have for their victims is akin to
the regard they have for nonhuman creatures.
But this raises another puzzle for the traditional understanding of dehumanization: why
should it be the case that seeing the victims as subhuman makes it easier to perpetrate violence
against them? The claim seems to be that it is easier for us to kill nonhuman creatures than humans,
but why should that be the case? Some of the killers in the Rwandan genocide, for example, discuss
how they had difficulty killing animals prior to the genocide: “Killing is very discouraging if you
yourself must decide to do it, even to an animal.”xxi While some of the perpetrators had slaughtered
chickens and cattle prior to the genocide, the only “advantage” it gave them was that they knew
better how to kill with a knife.xxii But this knowledge only makes killing a human physically easier,
not psychologically easier. In fact, when we must kill animals, we often devise quick and painless
ways of doing so precisely because it is not particularly easy to do.
What is more, we do not usually consider killing a nonhuman creature an evil act. Killing
animals for food or swatting flies because they annoy us are acts of killing (maybe even wrongful),
but they are not evil nor are they cruel. Killing nonhuman animals can become evil if it is done out
of cruelty or sadistic pleasure, but otherwise killing animals is often necessary or perfunctory. Even
if victims of genocide are seen as nonhuman, perpetrators go to the trouble of dressing up their
actions in moral garb, painting their actions as acts of war, or constructing other elaborate rationales
for killing. We may kill the cockroach, but we do not bother to justify killing the cockroach. Even
though victims of genocide are often euphemistically labeled with nonhuman terms, the attitudes we
take toward killing nonhuman animals and the attitudes perpetrators take toward killing their victims
are very different.
The challenge to understanding dehumanization is to explain how perpetrators can see their
victims as nonhuman while at the same time constructing elaborate justifications for the killing.
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When the perpetrators of genocide claim that killing their victims was like killing dogs, rats, or
cockroaches, what they seem to mean is that killing their victims held no more moral weight than
these other acts. This allegedly means they are “detached” from their victims. xxiii But creating
complex justifications for killing is not detached, nor is the cruelty and torture that often
accompanies genocidal acts. Killers can surely become numb to killing, but this usually takes place
long after they have engaged in repeated violence.xxiv I think we can resolve this puzzle by rejecting
the notion that dehumanization is about moral detachment. The claims that the victims are
nonhuman or subhuman are forms of moral perversion rather than moral detachment.xxv My suggestion
here is that dehumanizing is not a cause, but instead a consequence of a perversion of the
perpetrators’ moral selves. That is, dehumanizing victims has less to do with how the killers see the
victims than how the killers see themselves.
A full account of moral perversion of the self would take me beyond the scope of this
paper, but I can sketch how it might look in relation to the perpetrators of genocide. To illustrate,
Pauer-Studer and Velleman compare a S.S. physician who was stationed at Auschwitz and was critical
of the party, a loyal National Socialist who became an Einsatzkommando, and a committed Nazi “true
believer” and Sonderkommando who participated in mass executions.xxvi Each of these perpetrators
had different levels of zeal for the Nazi ideology, so it is perplexing why they all managed to
participate in the Holocaust nonetheless. Pauer-Studer and Velleman argue that all three managed to
construct a self-conception that allowed them to participate in the genocide while simultaneously
thinking of themselves as principled persons.xxvii The physician held onto the view of himself as a
professional and as such continued to view the prisoners in the camp as “patients.”xxviii The
Einsatzkommando referred to the executions he committed as “work” and thought of himself largely
as a laborer.xxix The Sonderkommando reinterprets his feelings of pity for his victims as weakness he
must overcome in order to be a valiant soldier to fight the “enemy.”xxx As we can see, the fact that
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the doctor thinks of and calls the prisoner’s “patients” is the result of his own embracing of his role
as a physician. When he is confronted with the fact that Auschwitz is really a death camp, he simply
clings to his identity as a doctor and so continues to see the victims as “patients.” It is not that case
that calling the prisoners “patients” allows him to live with himself, although certainly it reinforces
the self-conception he adopts. Instead, he sees the prisoners in a certain way because of the way he
sees himself.
What these three perpetrators have in common—and what ultimately most perpetrators of
genocide share—is the denial of their own moral self in favor of some other aspect of themselves.
Moral perversion is a form of self-deception. Perpetrators take as primary or highest some aspect of
oneself other than one’s moral agency. By thinking of themselves as doctors, laborers, and fighters,
the perpetrators refuse to see themselves as moral persons. Seeing themselves as moral persons
would necessitate that they likewise see their victims as fellow moral persons. Seeing oneself as a
moral agent precisely requires that one see oneself as one member of the moral community among
others and committed to norms, values, and principles that guide that community. Having a moral
self-conception would thus rule out the possibility of seeing the victim’s race, religion, or ethnic
background as grounds for her destruction. If, however, the perpetrators deny their moral
personality, they adopt some other self-conception that does emphasize difference. For instance, the
Hutus who killed Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide embraced their Hutu identity above all else,
which allowed them to see Tutsis primarily as Tutsis and not as people.
If we think of dehumanization as a consequence of moral perversion of the self, it explains
how the perpetrators wrongly (rather than simply mistakenly) see their victims as nonhuman. Since
moral perversion is a form of self-deception, the perpetrators are denying the moral agency they
share with their victims. If the victims are rats, dogs, or cockroaches, then the perpetrators see
themselves as fully human. One of the killers in Rwanda explains:
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We no longer saw a human being when we turned up a Tutsi in the swamps. I mean, a
person like us, sharing similar thoughts and feelings. The hunt was savage, the hunters were
savage, the prey was savage—savagery took over the mind.xxxi
Dehumanization of the victim is a way for perpetrators to reify that they are (still) human beings in
spite of the fact that they do inhumane acts. The killers see their victims as nonhuman because they
have embraced their roles as humans in the framework of the genocide. They see themselves as
“human” not in the sense of sharing common humanity with others, but in the sense of the
traditional natural order where humans sit atop other nonhuman animals. The labeling of victims as
nonhuman does not make killing easier on its own; killing is made easier because perpetrators deny
the moral agency they share with their victims.
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Wallace, R. Jay. Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
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i Berel Lang, “The Evil in Genocide” in Genocide and Human Rights: A Philosophical Guide ed. by John K.
Roth (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2005), 6-9
ii James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002)
iii Waller 2002, Becoming Evil, 137-140
iv Ibid.,139
v Ibid., 139
vi Ibid., 202
vii Ibid., 206
viii Ibid., 209
ix Ibid., 210
x Ibid., 210
xi Ibid., 212
xii Ibid., 213
xiii Doris Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2003), 37
xiv Alexander Hinton, ‘Why Did You Kill?: The Cambodian Genocide and the Dark Side of Face and
Honor’ Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 57, No. 1 (1998): pp. 93-122
xv P.F. Strawson, ‘Freedom and Resentment’ in Free Will: Oxford Readings in Philosophy, ed. Gary Watson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 77-79
xvi Strawson, ‘Freedom’, 79-80
xvii Ibid., 79
xviii Ibid., 78-79
xix Several philosophers have subsequently defended Strawson’s link between attitudes of blame and
regarding the person we blame as a full moral agent. R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); T.M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Gary Watson, Agency and Answerability (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004)
xx Waller, Becoming Evil, 9-24. Both Arendt and Browning are also representatives of this view. Hannah
Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Book, 2006) and
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998).
xxi Jean Hatzfeld, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak (New York: Picador, 2003), 48
xxii “In the end, man is an animal: you give him a whack on the head or the neck and down he goes. In the
first days someone who had already slaughtered chickens–and especially goats—had an advantage,
understandably,” Hatzfeld, Machete Season, 37. The killers are talking about learning how to physically kill
rather than how they can bring themselves psychologically to kill.
xxiii Waller, Becoming Evil, 202
xxiv The killers in the Rwandan genocide describe the shift from the excitement of killing to the boredom
with it, Hatzfeld, Machete Season, 47-51
xxv For the concept of moral perversion, I draw on the following sources: David Sussman, ‘Perversity of
the Heart’ The Philosophical Review 2005 114 2: pp. 153-177; Herlinde Pauer-Studer and J. David Velleman,
‘Distortions of Normativity’ Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 2011 14: 329-356; Jean Amery, At the Mind’s
Limits, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980)
xxvi Studer and Velleman, ‘Distortions’, 340-350
xxvii This is not the same thing as Lifton’s “doubling” theory. The self-conceptions are unified. See Robert
Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2000)
xxviii Studer and Velleman, ‘Distortions,’ 325
xxix Ibid., 351
xxx Ibid., 349
xxxi Hatzfeld, Machete Season, 47