Dehumanization seems to be a feature in particularly egregious abuses such as genocide, eugenics, gendered violence, and slavery. Recent philosophical analyses have examined what, if anything, distinguishes dehumanization from other...
moreDehumanization seems to be a feature in particularly egregious abuses such as genocide, eugenics, gendered violence, and slavery. Recent philosophical analyses have examined what, if anything, distinguishes dehumanization from other instances of discriminatory attitudes or social injustice. Most existing accounts focus on animalization and objectification. By the criteria of these accounts, cognitively disabled people are clearly dehumanized - yet they are often ignored or expressly excluded from consideration. Additionally, the solutions sometimes suggested for resisting or combatting dehumanization encounter specific challenges because of the vexed issue of personhood and cognitive disability.
This seminar sets out an analysis of dehumanization which includes cognitively disabled people, and presents infantilization as a further, unexplored process of dehumanization. Drawing on feminist philosophy and philosophy of disability, existing theories of dehumanization, and empirical work on infantilization and cognitive disability, I argue that - as with other processes of dehumanization - the infantilization of cognitively disabled people is both a social injustice and a conceptual failure.
