Chapter 3 - Rejecting Bad via Externalization

Summary

Two shocking examples of projecting the moral bad are presented in this chapter: Hitler’s and Putin’s worldviews. The deeper commonalities in the social identities they propagated are analyzed: dehumanization, purification, internal unity/external division, and enemy image construction. This leads to some practical implications: recognizing the existence of moral multiplicity instead of moral dualism, avoiding the identification of people on the basis of one category only, replacing social categories by personalized I-positions, broadening one’s moral circle beyond one’s favorite ingroup, intergroup contact, promoting a superordinate identity, developing an overarching meta-position, and creating access to the moral middle ground.