Yes, materialism and capitalism are both dehumanizing. This is a problem because dehumanization leads to atrocities and crimes against humanity.
Materialism is dehumanizing - What could be more dehumanizing than reducing a person to a machine operating according to deterministic consequences of the properties of atoms and physical laws.
http://www.discovery.org/a/6301
By reducing humanity to their biological makeup, these Darwinian-inspired biological determinists contributed to the dehumanization process.
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Human intent became irrelevant in interpreting human documents. Dehumanization thus spiraled even further downward, as all human values were construed as socially constructed.
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Human rights are meaningless is a world of determinism or social (or individual) constructivism.
Capitalism is dehumanizing - The problem of dehumanization is not unique to capitalism but capitalism does lead to dehumanization. If you ever worked for a corporation, you probably saw that workers are treated like objects and manipulated to improve profits by improving efficiency. For example, there is a common practice in the retail industry to treat workers like pieces of equipment to be turned on and off as needed by having them on call (which prevents them from finding a second job) but only calling them in to work if they are needed. And assembly lines treat workers as if they were cogs in a machine.
Corporate jargon reflects this dehumanization:
http://scholarsandrogues.com/2010/1...ployment-the-dehumanizing-toll-of-efficiency/
For example, ever heard any of these terms: “outsource,” “downsize,” “lay off,” “let go,” “headcount reduction,” “terminate,” “reduction in force”? These are all cleaner, emotionally sanitized ways of talking about firing a worker or group of workers. And when I say “firing,” that’s a slightly easier way of talking about taking away a worker’s ability to provide food and shelter, education and health care for him or herself and the spouses, parents and children who perhaps rely on that job for the basic necessities of life. When we go through an ROF, that’s considerably easier to think about than potentially putting an innocent child on the street, isn’t it? Even worse, we talk about “the last ROF round,” a linguistic structure that makes turfings not only sound natural, but routine. Like the seasons, or the cycles of the moon, or the start of a new school year or quarterly reports.
Dehumanization leads to atrocities
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3915417/pdf/nihms-547993.pdf
Dehumanized Perception: A Psychological Means to Facilitate Atrocities, Torture, and Genocide?
Dehumanized perception, a failure to spontaneously consider the mind of another person, may be
a psychological mechanism facilitating inhumane acts like torture. Social cognition – considering
someone’s mind – recognizes the other as a human being subject to moral treatment. Social
neuroscience has reliably shown that participants normally activate a social-cognition neural
network to pictures and thoughts of other people; our previous work shows that parts of this
network uniquely fail to engage for traditionally dehumanized targets (homeless persons or drug
addicts; see Harris & Fiske, 2009, for review). This suggests participants may not consider these
dehumanized groups’ minds. Study 1 demonstrates that participants do fail to spontaneously think
about the contents of these targets’ minds when imagining a day in their life, and rate them
differently on a number of human-perception dimensions. Study 2 shows that these humanperception
dimension ratings correlate with activation in brain regions beyond the social-cognition
network, including areas implicated in disgust, attention, and cognitive control. These results
suggest that disengaging social cognition affects a number of other brain processes and hints at
some of the complex psychological mechanisms potentially involved in atrocities against
humanity.