The Power of Humiliation in XXI century: law, society, culture

Humiliation is one of the most severe harms experienced by human beings. It affects an individual's identity - its development or disintegration. The memory of humiliation leaves a deep mark on the individual, sometimes despite the long passage of time (Margalit 2020). Reliving the emotion of humiliation motivates individuals both to take revenge, seek justice, as well as to preserve the memory of the injustice, to bear witness or, ultimately, to forgive.

Despite of the lack of theorethical consensus, humiliation (Margalit 1996; Frevent 2020; Nussbaum 2004; Taylor 2020; Ficker 2010; Krygier 2011; Ripstein 1997) is mostly defined as:

1. treating a person as a non-human (thing, animal, demon) or excluding an individual on the basis of his or her membership in a group burdened by some kind of stigma,
2. depriving the individual of basic, minimal control over his or her own life (e.g. extreme poverty),
3. the humiliator’s intention to humiliate: the satisfaction and sense of superiority he/she feels when humiliating the other.

There are three main objectives of the project:

1. We want to capture contemporary forms and spaces of humiliation. As Ute Frevent shows, while the anti-humiliation movement has successively transformed social and legal institutions it is not a picture of lineral progress (Frevent 2020). Modernity confronts us with new spaces of humiliation: relational, virtual or political.
2. Secondely our aim is to investigate the role of law, which is ambiguous in this context: it can be both an instrument of protection and humiliation. We are therefore interested of when the law itself humiliates, and in what ways. We distinguished two separate issues: the epistemic humiliation and injustice (Fricker 2010) at the level of the conceptualisation of harm, punishment and reparation in law, and the practical dimension of law and the encounters of individuals with legal institutions. What follows is the question whether the law has adequate tools to recognize various forms of humiliation and how the law could broaden its repertoire of responses to restore the dignity of the wronged. Arthur Ripstein stresses that the absence of a legal response, contributes to the reinforcement, the doubling of the harm of humiliation.
3. Finally, building on Margalit's The Decent Society, as the final objective of the project, we will go back to theoretial reflection on the idea of a decent society that does not humiliate those within its reach. Here we will investigate the relationship between the understanding of humiliation and the idea of a decent society, its social manifestations and legal practices of protecting against and responding to humiliation.