The Psychology Of Moral Exclusion And Moral Inclusion

The philosopher Peter Singer introduced the contemporary usage of "moral circle" in his 1981 book "The Expanding Circle," though the metaphor predates him. Singer's argument was that the historical direction of moral progress is the gradual expansion of who we consider to have morally significant interests — from family, to tribe, to nation, to species, and eventually, he argued, to all sentient beings.

That's a large claim and a contested one. But the descriptive component is hard to argue with: the moral circle has, in fact, expanded over time, and the expansions that once seemed radical are now considered self-evident.

What Singer's framework does not fully explain is the psychological mechanism — why the circle is narrow in the first place, and what actually moves it. For that, you need to go into the psychology.

Susan Opotow's 1990 paper "Moral exclusion and injustice: An introduction" (in the Journal of Social Issues) formalized a concept that had been floating in social psychology since the work of Henri Tajfel on in-group/out-group dynamics and Muzafer Sherif's robber's cave experiments.

Opotow's key insight was that moral exclusion is not simply prejudice or dislike. You can dislike someone while still including them in your moral universe. Moral exclusion is a different and more dangerous operation: it is the cognitive and emotional act of placing people outside the scope where moral considerations apply at all. Once excluded, they can be:

- Harmed without guilt — because harm to an excluded person doesn't register as harm in the full moral sense - Denied resources without discomfort — because their needs are not perceived as claims that matter - Used instrumentally — because their interests don't constrain your pursuit of your interests

Opotow identified several psychological markers of moral exclusion in operation:

1. Displacing responsibility — harm to excluded people is attributed to natural forces, their own choices, or inevitable processes rather than to identifiable agents who could be held responsible 2. Condescension — excluded people are perceived as needing to be managed, not heard 3. Derogation — attributing negative traits that justify the exclusion ("they are lazy, violent, backward, irrational") 4. Grouping and aggregating — perceiving excluded people as an undifferentiated mass rather than as individuals 5. Transcendent ideologies — using religious, national, or ideological frameworks to legitimate exclusion ("God's will," "natural selection," "progress requires sacrifice")

These are not exotic behaviors. They appear in ordinary policy discussions, in everyday social interactions, in media coverage, and in how charitable giving is structured and rationalized.

Evolution did not build us to care about strangers in distant places. This is not a character flaw — it is a survival design. For most of human evolutionary history, the unit of survival was the small group: roughly 50 to 150 individuals. Your fitness — your ability to survive and reproduce — was almost entirely determined by your relationships within that group. Caring intensely about people outside the group was, at minimum, a distraction and, at worst, a liability.

What this means neurologically: the brain's empathy circuitry is calibrated for proximate relationships. Brain imaging studies show that processing the faces of in-group members activates more neural activity in regions associated with social cognition (like the medial prefrontal cortex) than processing the faces of out-group members. This is not unique to any particular culture or race — it is a function of perceived group membership, and it shifts when group membership shifts.

The work of Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske at Princeton found something more disturbing: in certain conditions, the brain processes out-group members — particularly those perceived as low status and potentially threatening, like homeless people or drug addicts — using the same neural pathways it uses to process objects, not people. The social cognition network does not fully activate. This is neural-level dehumanization, occurring beneath conscious awareness, in ordinary people who would not endorse dehumanization if asked.

This is the starting point: an evolved brain with narrow empathy calibration, capable of literally perceiving certain categories of people as less than fully human. We are working against a strong current.

The question is not whether the current exists. It's whether you are going to let it run you.

The writer and public intellectual john a. powell (he does not capitalize his name) and his colleagues at the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley have developed an extensive framework for understanding how "othering" functions — the process by which individuals or groups are labeled and treated as not belonging, as inferior, as less than.

Powell's framework emphasizes that othering is not a permanent category but a dynamic process. It requires active maintenance. You have to keep doing things — telling stories, drawing legal lines, enacting policies, maintaining cultural norms — to keep certain people outside the circle. And this means that the process can be disrupted.

The opposite of othering, in powell's framework, is not "tolerance" or even "inclusion" in the superficial sense. It is "belonging" — a state where people are not merely permitted to be present but are recognized as having genuine standing, genuine voice, genuine membership in the community that makes decisions about their lives.

This distinction matters. Many institutional diversity and inclusion programs create inclusion without belonging — people are present, but their presence doesn't change how decisions are made, whose perspectives are treated as authoritative, or whose suffering is treated as urgent. The circle is widened just enough to absorb people without actually expanding its logic.

Real moral inclusion changes the logic. It changes who counts, whose interests constrain yours, whose pain you factor into your decisions before being asked.

At the far end of moral exclusion is full dehumanization — the explicit or implicit framing of a group as subhuman, as vermin, as disease, as pollution. This is not merely bad rhetoric. Research on genocide and mass atrocity consistently finds dehumanizing language as a precursor and enabler.

James Waller, in "Becoming Evil," analyzed how ordinary people — not pathological sadists — participate in mass atrocity. His finding: it requires a sustained social process that normalizes moral exclusion and escalates it incrementally. No society jumps immediately from normal to genocide. There are steps, and each step is made possible by the one before.

The Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which approximately 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed in roughly 100 days, was preceded by decades of deliberate dehumanization through radio broadcasts, political rhetoric, and educational systems that framed Tutsi people as "inyenzi" — cockroaches. The killing was not spontaneous. It was the endpoint of a constructed moral exclusion process.

This is the extreme case, and it is worth studying precisely because it reveals the mechanism in its most visible form. The mechanism does not require genocidal intent to operate. It operates at much lower intensities in ordinary social life — in which policies get made that predictably kill people in measurable numbers, and the decision-makers sleep fine because the people who die were outside the circle.

Gordon Allport's 1954 "Contact Hypothesis" — later extended, refined, and partially qualified by decades of research — proposed that under certain conditions, contact between members of different groups reduces prejudice and expands moral concern. The conditions Allport specified: equal status within the contact situation, common goals, intergroup cooperation, and support from authority figures.

Meta-analyses of contact research (Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp's 2006 analysis of 515 studies) found that contact generally reduces prejudice, though the effect varies significantly based on context. What the research also found: even imagined contact — mentally simulating a positive interaction with an out-group member — reduces prejudice to a measurable degree. The brain, it turns out, does not sharply distinguish between real and vividly imagined experience.

This has practical implications. You do not have to physically travel to every excluded group to expand your moral circle. Exposure to vivid, individualized narratives — not statistics, not aggregate data, but specific stories about specific people — activates the same social cognition networks that face-to-face contact activates.

This is why literature works. This is why journalism at its best works. This is why certain films and documentaries have shifted public moral opinion in ways that no policy brief has managed. The story of one person, told with enough specificity and intimacy, does what an argument cannot: it makes the person real.

Paul Bloom, in "Against Empathy," argues that raw emotional empathy is actually a poor guide to moral decision-making because it is biased toward the proximate, the vivid, and the relatable, while ignoring large-scale statistical suffering. He advocates for "rational compassion" — caring about people's welfare without requiring emotional identification. His point is valid as far as it goes. But it misses something: for most people, the bottleneck is not rationality. It is moral inclusion at the level of perception. People don't fail to help because their calculations are wrong. They fail to help because the people who need help are outside their circle, and outside the circle, even the most accurate calculation doesn't generate action.

You need the circle to expand first. Then the rational compassion can do its work.

History offers several examples of relatively rapid moral circle expansion, which matter because they demonstrate that the circle is not fixed:

The abolitionist movement. In 1750, chattel slavery was legally practiced in every European colonial power and most of the world. By 1888, it had been legally abolished in the last holdout in the Americas (Brazil). This happened in roughly 130 years — not an eyeblink, but fast in historical terms. The mechanism was not primarily economic argument (though economic arguments were made). It was the moral reframing, driven by the testimony of enslaved people themselves and the organizing of abolitionist movements, that enslaved people were fully human and their suffering fully real. Once enough people made that shift, the institution was doomed. Not immediately. But doomed.

The disability rights movement. In the mid-20th century, people with significant physical or cognitive disabilities were routinely institutionalized, legally denied basic rights, and excluded from public life. The disability rights movement, particularly in the United States from the 1960s onward, reframed disability not as a medical tragedy requiring management, but as a human variation requiring accommodation. The Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) was the legislative marker of a significant moral circle expansion — the explicit acknowledgment that the interests of disabled people constrain public and private decision-making in the same way that non-disabled people's interests do.

LGBTQ rights. In 1970, homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association and was illegal in most US states. In 2015, same-sex marriage was recognized federally. Forty-five years. The mechanism was heavily driven by personal contact — the AIDS crisis forced millions of Americans to encounter gay men and lesbian women as individuals with families and grief and love, not as abstract representatives of a lifestyle. Contact at scale, forced and terrible in its origin, expanded the circle.

None of these expansions were inevitable. All were contested. All required sustained human effort. All were opposed by people who had genuine interests — material, psychological, social — in keeping the circle where it was.

It is important to be honest about why moral exclusion persists despite its evident destructiveness. It is not simply ignorance. It is that inclusion has costs.

When the moral circle expands, the people newly included make claims. Their suffering becomes visible, and visible suffering demands response. Their interests constrain yours — you can no longer freely use their labor, their land, their resources, or their silence. Their voices enter decision-making processes that were previously controlled by a smaller group.

This is not abstract. In concrete terms: if you fully morally include everyone in a global supply chain, you can no longer purchase certain products without reckoning with the conditions of their production. If you fully morally include future generations, you cannot make certain economic decisions without reckoning with their cost. If you fully morally include non-human animals, your food system requires radical restructuring.

Moral inclusion is expensive. Not in the trivial sense of inconvenience, but in the real sense of reorganizing power, wealth, and decision-making. People who benefit from the current circle have genuine reasons — not just psychological defenses, but material interests — to resist its expansion.

This is why moral progress is never just a change in ideas. It is always a political struggle. The ideas matter — they create the language and the framework. But the ideas alone do not move circles. The circles move when the people inside them develop enough solidarity, visibility, and power to demand inclusion, and when enough insiders choose to support that demand against their short-term interests.

1. Mapping Your Circle Draw your moral circle on paper — concentric rings. At the center: yourself, your immediate family. Expand outward. Where does your immediate sense of obligation end? Where does your willingness to sacrifice for others diminish? Who is outside the outermost ring? Don't judge the answer. Just see it clearly. You cannot expand what you haven't mapped.

2. The Derogation Check For one week, notice every time you use — or hear used — derogatory language about a group. Not slurs necessarily, but the subtler kind: "those people," "they just don't understand," "that's what you'd expect from..." Each instance is a data point about where circle boundaries are being actively maintained. Naming the pattern doesn't automatically change it, but invisibility ensures it continues.

3. Individuating Practice When you encounter a group you have absorbed as an undifferentiated category — migrants, conservatives, the homeless, people from a religion you know nothing about — find one specific person's story. Not a representative story, not a spokesperson. A specific human, with a specific life. Read it slowly. Let it be particular. Particularity is the solvent of categorical exclusion.

4. The Policy Filter Apply this question to any policy you encounter: who is outside the moral circle that this policy assumes? Who is excluded from counting? Whose suffering is being treated as a natural cost rather than a harm that someone is causing? This is not a rhetorical question. Every policy implies a moral circle. Making that circle visible is the first step to contesting it.

5. The Interest Audit Honestly assess: in which situations do you benefit from keeping certain people outside your circle? What would you have to give up — economically, socially, psychologically — if you included them? This is not meant to produce guilt. It is meant to be honest about the real structure of resistance. The resistance to moral inclusion is not always irrational. Sometimes it is tracking real costs. Knowing that helps you make a genuine decision rather than a comfortable illusion.

The central premise of Law 1 — that if every person said yes to shared humanity, it would end world hunger and achieve world peace — is not a utopian fantasy. It is a description of what shared humanity would actually require.

World hunger does not persist because there is not enough food. It persists because the people who are hungry are outside the moral circles of the people who make decisions about food systems, trade policy, agricultural subsidies, and resource allocation. If they were inside those circles — if their hunger registered as a claim that mattered in the same way that the interests of shareholders and voters and trading partners register — the problem would be solvable within existing material resources. The resources exist. The will does not, because the circle does not include them.

War follows the same logic. Wars require each side to place the other sufficiently outside the moral circle that killing becomes acceptable and even valorized. Not complete exclusion — there are rules of war, Geneva Conventions, norms about civilian casualties. But partial exclusion: enough to make the deaths count as acceptable costs rather than as crimes.

The expansion of the moral circle is not a soft, sentimental project. It is the central political project of Law 1. It is what "we are human" demands in practice.

The circle you inherited is too small. Not because you are a bad person. Because every inherited circle is too small. That's the nature of inheritance — it reflects the limits of its time.

Expanding it is the work.