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David Livingstone Smith, Ph.D., professor of philosophy, wrote an essay that was published on July 26 as a guest post on the philosophy blog Discrimination and Disadvantage.

Titled “Disability as Metaphysical Threat,” the essay discusses Smith’s view that conceiving of others as subhuman enables people to transcend inhibitions against inflicting harm. “Thinking of others as despised or feared subhuman creatures cognitively excommunicates them from what we take to be the moral community, and empowers us to engage in acts of violence that would otherwise be difficult for us to execute,” he explains.

Because of humans’ status as a hyper-social species, however, Smith feels that dehumanizers are not able to completely “override their automatic recognition of the others’ humanity,” and, consequently, they view the dehumanized as monsters—beings who metaphysically threaten us by challenging the natural order of things (such as corpses that walk and werewolves who cross species).

Smith then relates this notion of metaphysically threatening monsters to people’s view of disabled individuals, which, he argues, explains efforts “to put (and keep) disabled people ‘in their place’ through practices of exclusion, marginalization, or extermination. “The disabled person is both conceived of as a human being and, simultaneously, perceived as departing from the anatomical norms that are supposedly definitive of the human,” he writes. “So, like the dehumanized person, the disabled person is felt to be both human and non-human; an object of horrified fascination and, all too often, of persecutory violence.”

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