Are human beings unique? (04.02.2025)

Are human beings unique?

I’m sitting here on the farm in Argentina, rather upset about a wild boar. I’ll explain. The farmhand adopted it as a baby and was hoping to bring it up as a pet, but everyone else is afraid of it (or what it will grow into) and so it’s now locked in a small cage all day long, only being let out at night.

In my mind, this is immoral and something needs to be done about it. Trying to get the farmhand to understand, is another matter. But, why is it immoral? You might think the answer is obvious, but philosophy asks us to dig as deep as we can and that’s what I’m going to try to do.

The wild boar is a sentient being. As Bentham said in the eighteenth century, the question isn’t whether it can think but whether it can suffer. It’s good to eliminate suffering where we can, and so we need to help the boar.

But is Bentham right to say animals can’t think?

This is complex because it’s not clear what he means by thinking. I suspect he is talking about rational thought. Evidently, the boar will never be able to do mathematics and logic. However, if thinking embraces an awareness of one’s environment and beliefs about that environment, then I think the boar has thoughts. It can’t express them in language so they will never be sophisticated, but the boar knows it wants to get out, that it is waiting for us to let it out, that it asks us to do so when we approach, and so on. 

This points to the boar being aware of itself. I don’t know if it can recognise itself in a mirror, but that is a very human-centric measurement of self-awareness (dogs aren’t very good at this test, but they can recognise their own scent amongst a myriad of others).

These abilities to have thoughts and beliefs, to be aware of oneself and to have desires are not unique to human beings. According to philosophers, they are characteristics of a wider category of things called ‘persons’. If they are right, then we’re going to have to stop thinking that ‘human being’ and ‘persons’ mean the same thing. If you believe in God, you know this already; God is a person but not a human being.

My worry about the boar is that it is a person – not a highly developed one compared to myself, but still a person of sorts. As a person is deserves to be treated with respect: its desires should be considered, and we should do all we can not to harm it.

If I want to argue that for the boar, then I will argue it more emphatically for those animals which are far more developed in their thinking such as apes, chimpanzees and the octopus. These creatures demonstrate complex thinking. Koko the gorilla is a case in question and it’s worth searching her on the internet: you will be amazed. Naturally, there is a lot of scientific debate over her abilities, but there is enough evidence to point to her personhood.

Some of you might worry that I’m pushing this too far. You might want to hold onto a clear distinction between ourselves and other animals, something that defines us unique. But what is that?

It makes more sense to think that we exist on a spectrum with all other living things, where at one end there is a single cell amoeba and the other end ourselves. Along this spectrum, are varying degrees of complexity.

If I’m right, then how we treat these complex creatures is a moral question not because they can suffer (though that is important) but because they have personhood like ourselves.