Britannica Sources used in this answer

How did the Great Chain of Being influence early beliefs about human inequality?

Created from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.

Overhead view of a diverse group of people standing in a circle, holding each other's hands in a gesture of unity and teamwork. — Race Skin color is one of the variables that has been used to classify people into different racial categories.

The Great Chain of Being, or scala naturae, was an ancient hierarchical paradigm that organized all existence—from simple organisms to humans, angels, and God—into a continuous, graded series. While originally a philosophical concept, it was later misappropriated by political and intellectual leaders to justify human inequality and colonial dominance.123

By reviving this framework, proponents of slavery and colonialism argued that social and racial hierarchies were natural or divinely ordained. In this view, physical differences among Indigenous peoples and those of African ancestry were used as markers to assign them a lower status on the chain. This provided a pseudo-scientific and moral veneer for the systemic oppression and exploitation of these groups.23

It is essential to recognize that this application of the Great Chain of Being was a tool of exclusion used to construct the myth of racial inferiority. Such ideologies are fundamentally unethical, as they deny the inherent dignity and equality of all human beings, serving only to perpetuate injustice and discrimination.3