The Supremacist Syndrome

Proponents of human exceptionalism claim that only humans possess certain morally significant capacities, and as a result are entitled to be treated better than members of all other species. In the last fifty years, scientists have discovered how these capacities are shared by other species, which only raises the questions of how and why we evade responsibility for inhumane behaviour, not only to animals but to one another.To answer these questions, independent scholar Peter Marsh examines in depth three different ideologies: ethnonationalist supremacism (the Holocaust in Hungary), racial supremacism (the rule of King Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo), and gender-based supremacism (men''s treatment of women in Victorian and Edwardian England). He shows how supremacists applied mechanisms of moral disengagement to legitimise and evade personal responsibility for oppressing and exploiting members of a less-powerful group.Marsh then considers whether these different types of supremacism