The question of subhumanity, cont.

In two parallel exchanges today, here and here, two readers and I clarify a key reason—in addition to another, biblically based reason I gave a few days ago—why it’s not right or useful to hypostatize (i.e., to construe as a real existence) certain savage, subhuman-seeming behaviors as representing a concrete “subhuman” being. Namely, such hypostatization denies the moral agency and responsibility of the persons in question. Furthermore, such denial of the moral agency of certain nonwhite or non-Western people is exactly what I have always criticized liberals for, in my theory of the three-character “script” of liberalism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 20, 2012 08:40 PM | Send