Article 3g: Dehumanisation Increases Instrumental Violence, but not moral violence (Rai et al., 2017)

Question 1

Dehumanisation

Answer 1

Perpetrators seeing victims as nonhuman, and therefore, not entitled to moral obligation or sympathy. And thus enabling predators to act out their violent impulses free of inhibition and without remorse.

In this article: failure to engage in social cognition of other human minds.

Question 2

Instrumental violence

Answer 2

Violence that is employed as a means to attain a subsidiary (bijkomstig) goal.
Example: shooting a police officer while robbing a bank. This is morally objectionable, but nonetheless desirable for instrumental reasons).

In this article: perpetrators who do not necessarily desire to harm their victims, but knowingly harm them in order to achieve some other objective.

Question 3

Moral violence

Answer 3

Motivated by moral sentiments that require violence despite any moral inhibitions against it.

In this article: perpetrators who harm their victims because they see them as deserving of it.

Question 4

Design of the study

Answer 4

They conducted 5 experiment and asked people to perform different scenario’s like:
- Fire drone strikes at innocent victims (instrumental)
- Hurting someone for money (instrumental)
- Killing enemy soldiers (moral)

Question 5

Background theory

Answer 5

Morally motivated predators wish to harm victims who deserve it, can experience it fully and understand its meaning. To do so, their victims must be capable of human thinking and intentions. feeling pain and moral emotions –> they must be human. This is why perpetrators of moral harm feel NO need to dehumanise their victims.

Question 6

Hypothesis

Answer 6

1. Dehumanisation enables instrumental violence by weakening inhibitions that would otherwise restrain the violence –> making perpetrators incenstitive to victims suffering.
2. Dehumanisation can not cause moral violence, because it would strip the victim of the qualities that necessitated the violence in the first place.

Question 7

Main results of the study

Answer 7

• Dehumanisation enables violence that perpetrators see as unethical, but instrumentally beneficial.
• Dehumanisation does NOT contribute to moral violence, because morally motivated perpetrators wish to harm complete human beings who are capable of deserving blame, experiencing suffering and understanding its meaning.

Question 8

Criticism to Rai’s theory of dehumanisation

Answer 8

This definition of dehumanisation is overly narrow and fails to account for cases where victims are dehumanised not by denying their humanity, but by attributing them with morally deprived, uniquely human traits (like aggression and narcissism), which can also motivate violence.