tend to leave them within this arena even if they lose particular capacities. Conversely, if scienti

tend to leave them within this arena even if they lose particular capacities. Conversely, if scientists discover that an organism outside the arena of moral patient-hood has capacities of experience and agency that are on a par with those inside the arena, this evidence often promotes their legal status and protection. Such was the fate of the octopus, an invertebrate once classified by Aristotle as “stupid”, but now elevated to the company of much smarter animals that solve novel problems, deploy trickery, and show some evidence of being aware of their behavior. As such, they are one of the few invertebrates to enjoy heightened protection and care when they are kept in captivity. Moral agents are high in agency, meaning that they can distinguish right from wrong, exert self- control in the context of selfish temptation, can be blamed and punished, and are expected to care for moral patients. Moral patients are high in experience, including especially the capacity to feel pain. Both moral agents and patients have moral worth. But as in all entities that have worth or value, some are more valuable than others. So it is with moral worth. This is where departures from humanness get interesting, dangerously so. When we strip individuals of their moral worth, denying them qualities that define humanness, we have entered a world of distortion and denial that facilitates and justifies excessive harms. Across many studies, individuals consider themselves to be more human — as defined by the dimensions of experience and agency — and to have greater moral worth than other individuals. When individuals are socially ostracized and excluded from a group, they judge themselves as less human, and so do the spectators who observe the ostracism. Individuals judge members of their own group to be more human and morally worthy than those outside the group, no matter how small or broad the group is. What counts is our overall sense of how we compare to others, and the dimensions used to calibrate this similarity metric. The Australian social psychologist Nick Haslam carried out several experiments to determine how our rating of a group’s humanness influenced how much we praise, blame and protect them, as well as whether we believe that rehabilitation or punishment is most appropriate after they have done something wrong. Haslam based his study on the idea, supported by the law, science, and our folk intuitions that we blame, praise and punish only those who do bad things on purpose as opposed to by accident. Conversely, we favor rehabilitation in those cases where we believe that the person can right a wrong, learning a lesson from a prior transgression. Subjects started by rating several different social groups along different dimensions of humanness. Though Haslam’s dimensions were slightly different from those used by Gray and Wegner, they generally corresponded to experience and agency, including compassion, warmth and a sense of community on the one hand, and reason, self-control, civility, and refinement on the other. The target social groups were associated with negative or positive stereotypes such as the homeless, mentally disabled, athletes, politicians, doctors, lawyers, gays, and different religious groups. Next subjects imagined that a member of one of these groups had acted morally or immorally, or had been mistreated in Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 91 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012837