Thank you for your comments. Perhaps what I should have made more clear is that when I refer to the objectification of a person I am referring to an ethical value judgment. Objectification is more than categorizing, such as the examples of designating something as a mammal or even a father. Objectification is seeing in an ethical sense a person as an object to be used and subject to one’s will. I am thinking here of two philosophical ideas. The first is Kant’s categorical imperative that a person should never be used as a means to an end. The second is Heidegger’s concept of ready-to-hand in which an object being used disappears to the user, in other words, taken for granted without identity. So, I would agree with you that we need to categorize in the sense of generalizing, but no, we need not objectify other people in terms of using others as objects for our own ends, which is an ethical value judgment.