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Show Chapter XI. Xenophobia and Moral Anomaly Chapter X elaborated some criteria of inclusiveness fashioned specifically for the non-ideal reality of a practically adequate moral theory. These criteria were intended in part to redress the harmful consequences of pseudorationalizing significant moral phenomena out of the realm of moral concern - i.e. of turning such phenomena into first- or third-person moral anomaly that functions as an enigmatic and alien threat that therefore undermines and destabilizes the theory. I suggested that these criteria themselves had moral import, in that they counteracted the exclusion of morally significant agents, actions, events or states of affairs from the realm of moral concern; and therefore counteracted the pseudorational dehumanization and demeaning treatment of morally significant agents as third-personal moral anomaly. Satisfaction of these criteria of inclusiveness would not ensure the moral rectitude of all recognized members of the resulting moral community. But it would ensure that no moral agent were viewed as so much of an enigmatic and alien threat to one's favored moral theory, to one's honorific self-conception and therefore to the interior coherence of one's self that such an agent's capacity for rational agency and therefore moral accountability themselves were denied. So, in particular, satisfaction of the proposed criteria of inclusiveness would tend to defeat the disposition to xenophobia. The xenophobic response marks the outermost boundary of our pseudorational response to third-personal moral anomaly more generally. In Chapters VIII and IX I considered examples in which another person's behavior violated our favored moral theory in ways that impelled us merely to rationalize it. More serious and disruptive violations were met with dissociation. Third-personal moral anomalies that were even more morally unacceptable were simply denied out of existence. I did not attempt to correlate the seriousness of the violation with the magnitude of moral harm done, since I do not believe there to be any such correlation. However, there are two cases in which we exclude third-personal moral anomaly from membership in a moral community that do correlate with magnitude of moral harm. The first is our instinctive reaction to a moral agent's deliberately infliction of unthinkable moral evil; Hitler would be the most familiar but not the only instance of such an agent. I suggested in Chapter IX that we react to such instances as assaults on the very concept of morality our moral theory expresses; i.e. we assign Hitler and the like the status of incorrigible moral anomaly. But the second case is even more radical than this, for in essence it mirrors what Hitler and others like him actually do. By deliberately disregarding, diminishing or destroying others' rational agency - i.e. by dehumanizing them, Hitler and others like him exile recognizably rational |
