Seeing the Good: Rehumanizing Moral Conflict in a Dehumanizing Age

This dissertation integrates insights from metaethical constructivism and enactive cognitive science to rehumanize both "religiously" and "secularly" grounded moral conflict and its dehumanizing side effects. Specifically, my motivating problem centers around the way in which moral conflict can be used to "justify" dehumanization in the form of what I term moral exclusion-qua-subject; exclusion from collective moral deliberation for one reason or another. Moral exclusion-qua-subject can in turn enable a slide into what we more typically think of as the dangers of dehumanization, and what I circumscribe as moral exclusion-qua-object: traditional human rights violations up to and including violence and death. At stake in this project is thus both the relative health and cohesion of our moral communities as well as the possibility of avoiding the darker threats of violence on an individual or mass scale. My critical diagnosis is that by overcoming what I refer to as the metaethical divide (dealt with in Chapters 2 and 3)—and even more importantly, by reconceptualizing our understandings of perception, rationality, objectivity, and identity (Chapters 4 and 5)—we can disrupt the pathway from existence-of-moral-conflict → the dehumanizing belief that the person with whom we disagree "must" be either unable or unwilling to engage in proper moral deliberation (and thus is unworthy of inclusion in collective moral deliberation). My constructive proposal makes both an explanatory (metaethical and moral epistemic) contribution (Chapter 6) in the form of what I term enactive constructivism, as well as a practical, action-guiding one (Chapter 7) by advocating for the cultivation of specific rehumanizing epistemic virtues.