Topics Mind

Question I was wondering, what is it (other than so called intelligence and communication) that separates humans from animals or everything else in the universe? Pico della Mirandola in the "Oration on the Dignity of Man" describes it as human nature being undetermined or the right to determine destiny and animals have a determined nature. However, in general it seems as though humans act predictably given their environment and experiences.

Accepted:
November 15, 2005

Comments

It's pretty clear that we differ from other animals (and they differ from each other) in lots of ways -- some creatures can navigate by sonar or radar, we can't; some hibernate, we don't. And lots of work in both cognitive psychology and cognitive ethology is currently focused on trying to understand the specific differences between human and non-human animals' linguistic and conceptual abilities.

But you seem to be asking whether there is something that 'separates' us in the sense of marking us out as better than or superior to 'everything else'. And I wonder whether there is any such thing. Moreover, I think it's illuminating to ask why it matters whether we are different in this way. One good reason humans might want to think of themselves as more important than other creatures is that it might justify our treating such creatures in ways that we don't generally think it's okay to treat each other (e.g. killing them for research purposes). But if one doesn't think that humans were created by God to rule over other creatures, then it's no small task to say what might mark us out as superior. And it's also not obvious that we need to be superior in order to treat other creatures differently from the ways we treat each other. So it seems to me that we should think about the reasons that we care about being different, and not just assume that there must be something which 'really' distinguishes us from 'the beasts'.