What is Moral Cruelty?

Is disparaging someone’s personhood a function of mere thoughtlessness? Or is it a moral wrong rooted in an asymmetry of power that tempts the masters to abuse their unaccountable authority? Or is disparagement, which is an effect of what Judith Shklar calls “snobbery”, instead among the defining forms of political cruelty, one that entrenches inequality through the ordinary use and abuse of the body, of skin, of color?

In this lecture, Dr. Aishwary Kumar explores the depth and structure of disparagement as a political and moral form, tracing its life along what WEB Du Bois calls the global “color line.” He examines its logic along two vectors. One, an infra-political, colonial logic that uses juridical sanction and civic norms to make a person’s inequality hurt, splitting their self and consciousness itself into two. And two, an ultrapolitical, technological apparatus that mobilizes archaic theologies and new racisms to make extreme condescension…