新香港六合彩资料 philosophy professor David Livingstone Smith writes guest blog for 'Discrimination and Disadvantage' on the metaphysical threat of the disabled
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 鈥淒isability as Metaphysical Threat,鈥 the essay discusses Smith鈥檚 view that conceiving of others as subhuman enables people to transcend inhibitions against inflicting harm. 鈥淭hinking 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,鈥 he explains.
Because of humans鈥 status as a hyper-social species, however, Smith feels that dehumanizers are not able to completely 鈥渙verride their automatic recognition of the others鈥 humanity,鈥 and, consequently, they view the dehumanized as monsters鈥攂eings 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鈥檚 view of disabled individuals, which, he argues, explains efforts 鈥渢o put (and keep) disabled people 鈥榠n their place鈥 through practices of exclusion, marginalization, or extermination. 鈥淭he 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,鈥 he writes. 鈥淪o, 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.鈥
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