ABSTRACT
David Livingstone Smith addresses two important problems with the claim that we dehumanize others by conceiving of them as subhuman animals. “The problem of humanity,” is that dehumanizers implicitly or explicitly acknowledge the humanity of those whom they ostensibly regard as subhumans. “The problem of monstrosity,” is that dehumanizers often characterize those whom they dehumanize not merely as subhuman animals, but as monstrous entities. Drawing on work in psychology, anthropology, and philosophy, Smith argues that the recognition of dehumanized people's humanity and their transformation into monsters are both consequences of dehumanizers' representations of them as human and subhuman simultaneously, and that this is caused by our automatic psychological disposition to recognize humanness conjoined with our tendency to epistemically defer to authority figures who tell us that some others are, despite appearances, subhuman animals.
