New York, NY: Springer. moral exclusion, and objectification.Nussbaum, M. C. (1999). Sex and Social Justice.
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Moral exclusion has few critiques, but research on this phenomenon has limitations. Allen-Collinson's (2009) study on research administrations was purely restricted to an academic setting and therefore was a small-scale project that had limitations regarding restricted population range, and diverse roles of the research administrators that were interviewed. These factors made it difficult to find conclusive results regarding research administrators as being negatively marked due to moral exclusion. Leets' discussion regarding moral exclusion and social justice (2001) was limited by the restricted population that was being sampled and the possibility for biases occurring within the self-report measures.
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Opotow, Gerson, and Woodside (2005), explore moral exclusion theory in terms of teaching peace education and providing a structured and systematic approach to the complex issue of peace. Opotow et al. (2005) lists four key social dilemmas that moral exclusion systematically illustrates in the study of conflict, war, and peace: educating for coexistence, educating for human rights, educating for gender equality, and educating for environmentalism. According to Opotow et al.
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Moral exclusion is a psychological process where members of a dominant group view their own group and its norms as superior to others, belittling, marginalizing, excluding, even dehumanizing targeted groups. A distinction should be drawn between active exclusion and omission. The former requires intent and is a form of injustice, known as moral exclusion; while the latter is thoughtlessness (Leets, 2001, Forsyth, 2010). The targeted group is viewed as undeserving of morally mandated rights and protections (Forsyth, 2010).
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Music has always been a public forum with the ability to drastically alter culture and carry messages of dissent. Consequently, when moral exclusion is seen as a human capacity it logically follows that all humans also have the capacity to limit its consequences. As Opotow et al. (2005) suggest, Moral Exclusion Theory can be coupled with peace education to better understand conflict between groups that lead to extreme situations such as genocide, and also shift to educating about the importance of an inclusionary focus for groups and individuals.
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Moral exclusion occurs when groups or individuals are excluded from an ingroup's sphere of moral values, rules and beliefs. Whereas delegitimization is the process of categorizing others into negative social groups, which exclude them from acceptable humanness. Through this process of delegitimization, dehumanization towards others is facilitated, which in turn leads to moral exclusion and the justification of immoral treatment and behavior towards individuals or a group of people. There are two aspects of dehumanization: the denial of uniquely human attributes, and the denial of human nature attributes.
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When cultural norms shift toward exclusion of certain groups they can be rationalized; thereby granting legitimization of behavior into the collective consciousness. Ofreneo and de Vela (2006) developed a model to depict systems of violence situated within a society which are co-created by the social psychological process of moral exclusion, cultural norms that justify violence, and the economic and political hierarchies of power that maintain it. Individuals' psyches function in group norms in three levels of society where moral exclusion roots and recreates itself. At the bottom is the social psychological, within an individual psyche.
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When conflict between groups escalates, the in-group/out-group bias between the groups heightens. Severe violence between groups can be either the antecedent or the outcome of moral exclusion. At its extreme it is a bidirectional phenomenon that defies precise origin.
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That is to say, within each culture the criteria for who is cast out is based on particular values. Intercultural differences in the standard exist, but are associated with power within that culture. No setting is immune from marginalizing members. For instance, moral exclusion IS an area of academic study, yet within academia, instances of the phenomena exist.
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Moral exclusion includes situations of distinct severity, such as war, genocide, and slavery. Some examples are controversial, like abortion, immigration, and the death penalty. The crux of the matter, invariably, is who has the ability to determine who is worthy of human dignities. In each example, the standard a group or society uses to exclude the other is culturally derived.
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Genocide is not an outdated relic of war, since 1951 there have been dozens of documented horrific Genocides in history; many continue. The centuries-old conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis stems from moral exclusion. Both are convicted in their own belief that they are the "chosen" people and the rightful inhabitant of the land. Each group is intolerant of the other's beliefs, customs, and perceived rights to the land.
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Dehumanization is the process through which a person or group of people are denied 'humanness' or human attributes. The victim is no longer viewed as a person with feelings, hopes and concerns, but objectified as a lesser sub- human. Dehumanization is identified as one of the mechanisms of moral disengagement, as it justifies treating others with less moral concern and empathy, and therefore validates violent or abusive treatment towards others. Dehumanization involves the moral exclusion and delegitimization of others.
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As explored by Mukherjee, Molina and Adams (2012), this legislation may be intended to contain illegal immigration, or it may be ethnic categorization as the basis for excluding rights to certain U.S. citizens who do not look like the dominant group. A similar type of moral exclusion is seen in the treatment of people in the city of New York. Individuals can be stopped, questioned and frisked without cause, because they "look suspicious" to police officers in the area. The police officers believe they have the authority to violate these peoples' rights in order to meet certain standards in their respective divisions.
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Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Dehumanization occurs across several domains; it is facilitated by status, power, and social connection; and results in behaviors like exclusion, violence, and support for violence against others. "Dehumanisation is viewed as a central component to intergroup violence because it is frequently the most important precursor to moral exclusion, the process by which stigmatized groups are placed outside the boundary in which moral values, rules, and considerations of fairness apply." David Livingstone Smith, director and founder of The Human Nature Project at the University of New England, argues that historically, human beings have been dehumanizing one another for thousands of years.
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Throughout the course of history there have been instances in which human beings treat others as less than human and undeserving of equal moral treatment. Occurrences such as the Nazi Genocide during World War II and the African slave trade have led researchers to question whether or not human beings have the tendency to deem others as "worthy" or "unworthy" of moral treatment. Furthermore, if it were the case that humans label one another as acceptable or unacceptable and treat each other accordingly, it is important to examine the rationalization that occurs during this process. This is the type of thinking that spurred Morton Deutsch, Susan Opotow and Ervin Staub to investigate the processes of dehumanization and moral exclusion.
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Susan Sutherland Isaacs, and other members of the object-relations school of psychoanalysis, set the stage for moral exclusion research with the theory that perceiving certain people as "allies" and others as "enemies" is intrinsic to human nature (Deutsch, 1990; as cited in Isaacs, 1946). This categorization of persons creates a marked distinction between "good" and "bad", leading to the exclusion of those who are negatively perceived from the moral community. Deutsch, Opotow and Staub have defined the moral community, or scope of justice, to be a "...psychological boundary for fairness, within which concerns with justice and moral rules govern our conduct," (Deutsch, 1974, 1985; Opotow, 1990; Staub, 1987, 1990). Such exclusion has been thought to be evolutionary, as it is beneficial to individuals to avoid others who are harmful and seek out those that are helpful.
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