Viewing dignity as socially bestowed makes killing wrongdoers easier to justify

Evidence

Philosophical battles have been fought over whether the dignity of personhood is divinely given or socially bestowed (Feser, 2011). In the latter case, dignity is developed by goodness and achievement and lost through wrongdoing. Intentional killings are easier to justify if human dignity is construed to have a social origin. Individuals who commit heinous crimes are judged to be unworthy of dignity and deserve to be stripped of it. Attributing subhuman and bestial qualities to evildoers implies that they can even be excluded from the category of common humanity. On the other hand, if the sanctity and dignity of life have a divine origin, abolitionists could charge the state with playing God by taking human life intentionally. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1892

Philosophical battles have been fought over whether the dignity of personhood is divinely given or socially bestowed (Feser, 2011). In the latter case, dignity is developed by goodness and achievement and lost through wrongdoing. Intentional killings are easier to justify if human dignity is construed to have a social origin. Individuals who commit heinous crimes are judged to be unworthy of dignity and deserve to be stripped of it. Attributing subhuman and bestial qualities to evildoers implies that they can even be excluded from the category of common humanity. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1892

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to moral disengagement mechanisms from earlier chapters — dehumanization and attribution of blame as enabling mechanisms — here applied to the dignity-of-personhood framing. — connects to: Posthumous martyr images of ordinary victims can unite a divided public — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 215; Comparing victims to animals makes their murder easier — Gregory H. Stanton, Ten Stages of Genocide, 14
• SEED: The dignity-as-social vs. dignity-as-divine distinction is a useful lens for both the capital punishment debate and broader dehumanization questions (e.g., how we treat prisoners, refugees, the unhoused).
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1892