nonperson

plural nonpersons · plural nonpeople

1. Not a real person; a subhuman.

   Arguably, what is so hateful about a hate crime is that it is an attempt by some individual or group to treat a Person as a Nonperson.

   1994, Lisa J. McIntyre, Law in the Sociological Enterprise, page 92

   2 more examples

   As all lives must end, do you prefer to die as a nonperson, forgotten in a nursing home and totally stripped of dignity and independence?

   1989, Michael C. Kearl, Endings: A Sociology of Death and Dying, page 146

   How does hate work? [...] One answer is that the poor person (or the Jew, or the Asian, or the Native American, or whoever) becomes, intellectually, linguistically, and emotionally, a "lessperson," and then a nonperson.

   1998, John E. Tropman, Does America Hate the Poor?, page 6

2. Something other than a person; an object.

   No nonperson is psychologically indistinguishable from you.

   2001, Eric T. Olson, “A Compound of Two Substances”, in Soul, Body, and Survival, page 77

   2 more examples

   Taken together, all the results suggested that discrimination of person from nonperson slides was not controlled by an obvious single stimulus feature.

   1995, Roger K. R. Thompson, “Natural and Relational Concepts in Animals”, in Comparative Approaches to Cognitive Science, page 179

   For example, Benveniste [...] discusses the connection of first- and second-person pronouns with the speech situation, and even goes as far as to claim that the third person is a nonperson, since the referents of third-person pronouns are not speech-act participants.

   2002, Ritva Laury, “Interaction, grounding, and third-person referential forms”, in Frank Brisard, editor, Grounding: The Epistemic Footing of Deixis and Reference, page 85