What Role Does Exclusion Play in Hate and Violence? Part 2

By Linda Fisher Thornton

Moral exclusion includes using an insider mindset and thinking that others (who are not members of the group) as not worthy of protecting. If you’re not yet familiar with moral exclusion, this post may be helpful background on differences in world views and selective inclusion.

“When the dominant emotion is fear, people lose their ethical grounding and may quickly wander away from… values. It’s not a conscious choice, since their brains have automatically switched to lower-level decision making to protect them from real or perceived harm. Fear creates a blindness that blocks our ability to see past the immediate threat.”
Thornton, Linda F., Fear is a Poor Advisor (Moving Us Away From Ethical Thinking To Protect Us), Leading in Context Blog

In order to make good ethical decisions, we need to be culturally aware, respectful of other cultures, and open to interacting with people who are not like us. This post addresses the need for cultural competence and shares a detailed guide to intercultural competencies at the end of the post.

It is obviously a problem when hate comes into play in interpersonal interactions, but there is also another complicating factor.

(Kernberg) suspects that when hate becomes destructive, morals are likely to act as an accelerant, particularly moral justifications for harm doing, or moral exclusion.
Opotow, S. (2005). Hate, Conflict, and Moral Exclusion. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), The psychology of hate. Abstract, American Psychological Association

It is important to make people aware of the dangers of placing people into “in groups” and “out groups.” Once a person or group is “excluded” in our minds, we may become blind to the impact of our choices on that person or group, and may justify actions against them in our minds as morally “right” even though those actions are not morally right at all and may cause great harm.