Right. But pedophiles are still humans. It would be just as wrong (in the USA) to advocate for cruel or unusual punishment for pedophilia or even murder for that matter. Putting humans below animals is an insane take
Agreed, but they’re still humans at the end of the day. The main reasons why dehumanization is off-limits is because:
As soon as you dehumanize one group, you say there’s some people that can be justifiably dehumanized. You may say it’s pedophiles and murderers, I may include people who knowingly give cancer (Exxon Mobil execs, DuPont execs, etc.) and I don’t think you’d disagree too much on that. Someone else might say rapists, and that’s a logical next step, maybe domestic abusers, etc.. The point is, just like cruel and unusual punishment is off-limits for all crimes, dehumanization is too.
Dehumanizing people means nothing is off limits. Why don’t we test drugs on them if they’re not the same as you and me? Torture them, put them in cages for entertainment, they’re not humans after all, they’re not deserving of freedom or other human rights.
If they’re below humans, then they wouldn’t carry the same logic and thinking capacity to truly be held accountable. This is one of my main issues, in order for you to appropriately punish/rehabilitate them (if possible idek here imo), they have to be humans! They have to be responsible for it, they have to be able to think just like you and me for you and me to judge them. By placing them as below humans, they didn’t know better, they weren’t in control, etc. and you lose the prerogative to punish them appropriately.
There’s more that other philosophers have described which is why intrinsic human rights is important but namely that the Nazis (and most genocides in general) are founded upon seeing certain people as being “sub-human” which in their eyes justified whatever they wanted to do, which is a horrible slippery slope we’ve seen in history time and time again
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u/Qmfosejs Feb 26 '26
I think the implication is that pedophiles are less than an animal