Inhumanity

Two components, and the second is the one that makes the term usable. Lack of empathy alone describes a capacity, and capacities are difficult to establish from outside and easy to claim. Denial of the need of others to live dignified lives describes a position that a person takes and an institution can hold, and dignity in this framework is a specific thing, preservation of ownership over one's own inner circles of self. So the definition names something checkable. Anyone whose arrangements require that other people not own their inner circles of self is denying the need, whatever they feel about it. That is why the word attaches to industries rather than only to individuals in Marsh's usage. She applies it to the psychopath industry and to a great deal of psychiatry and psychology, describing an industry built on fear and demonization of the other, providing binary and absolute diagnosis, which produces exactly the denial the definition names by ruling in advance which people are entitled to dignified lives. The pairing of the two components matters in the other direction as well. Empathy travels along conduits and an endo-ideal has inhibited empathic conduits, so a lack of empathy is often a structural position rather than a personal defect, which means the term describes an arrangement someone is occupying at least as much as a quality they possess.

Dehumanization is the standard concept in this territory, with Nick Haslam distinguishing animalistic from mechanistic forms and Kelman and Bandura describing the moral disengagement that permits atrocity. Human rights discourse uses inhuman treatment as a legal category, defined by the severity of suffering inflicted rather than by the attitude behind it. Philosophical work on cruelty, from Montaigne to Judith Shklar, treats it as the deliberate infliction of suffering. Marsh's definition sits between the psychological and the legal, since it names neither an attitude nor a threshold of suffering but a denial of entitlement, which is what allows it to be established from what an institution does rather than from what anyone in it feels.