morally worthy or sacred. It shows how easily we can flip our values in the face of tempting alternatives. The scientific evidence presented in this section shows that our decisions to treat others according to different moral principles or norms is powerfully affected by our sense of what counts as another human being. What counts includes at least two important dimensions, one focused on agency and the other on experience. These dimensions determine whether we blame or praise someone, punish or rehabilitate them, and ultimately, include or exclude them from the inner circles of moral agents or moral patients. Those who fall outside these two inner circles are morally worthless. Those who are morally worthless can be destroyed or banished. Some things are justifiably excluded and fit with our general sense of reality — rocks, dirt, cardboard boxes, plastic balls, and pieces of glass. Other things are excluded because they don’t fit with our values of what reality should be. This is where distortion and denial enter the process. This is where we create walls around members of one group in order to keep others out. This is where we express partiality instead of the impartiality that Lady Justice champions with her two balanced scales and blind fold-covered eyes. This is where we exclude others from our inner sanctum in order to justify great harms. How is the inner sanctum set up and put into action over a
lifetime, sometimes for legitimate causes and sometimes for illegitimate and unconscionable causes?
Populating the inner sanctum
Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Laureate and Holocaust survivor, remarked that “anti-Semitism is the most ancient form of prejudice.” This claim may well be true of human written history, but is most definitely false if one considers the fact that all social animals and human societies, including the hunter-gatherer groups that are descendants of people that predated the Jews, hate some individuals and love others. Prejudice, though often based on deep seated ideological biases and stereotypes that humans invent, is, at root, a form of partiality. Every social animal, either extinct or alive today, expresses partiality. This is a highly adaptive and ancient psychology, promoting the care of young, investment in mates, and escape strategies against enemies. Humans are no different, except for the role that our promiscuous brains play in fueling partiality with ideology and symbolism. Sometimes when we express our partiality it is for the noble cause of caring for our children and for defending ideological beliefs surrounding humanitarian causes, including defense of basic human rights. Sometimes when we express our partiality, it is for the ignoble cause of destroying others. How does human partiality begin? Do babies express preferences for certain social categories? How does their experience sculpt new categories? How is the inner sanctum
populated, enabling us to preferentially help those within and harm those outside?
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 94
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