XIII—Reclaiming the Idea of ‘the Human’

Abstract

Progressive social movements correctly presume that justice demands treating people with humane regard: combining respect for human agency with concern for human vulnerability to suffering. Promoting humane regard is a critical means of acknowledging the moral claims of humanity. Some critics reject the underlying concept of a universal humanity, in virtue of which human beings form a distinct community of reciprocal moral obligation. Critics charge that the concept presumes indefensible dualisms (of mind and body, and humanity and nature); that it wrongly assigns a privileged status to reason; and that it involves an unsupportable belief in human exceptionalism. I argue that we can assert the moral claims of humanity without privileging reason, repudiating nature, or denying that there are many valuable ways to be human. I also defend an account of human moral exceptionalism that does not imply human moral superiority, to show that we can meet morally weighty obligations to humans while affirming morally substantive connections to non-human communities and domains.

Meeting of the Aristotelian Society, held at Senate House, University of London, on 10 June 2024 at 6:00 p.m.

I

Introduction. In an incisive account of the concept ‘human being’, Cora Diamond argues that ‘an immense amount of what being human is for us can be present in a look that passes between two people’, although ‘all that can equally be denied in a look’ (1988, p. 264). Diamond believes that ‘novelists and other writers’ can deepen our grasp of the concept: showing what it means to recognize another as human, and what happens when we fail to accord recognition or refuse to extend it. Yet since the mid-nineteenth century, some of the most valuable insights about the concept have emerged from social criticism and political activism conducted by progressive social movements. These movements have shown that human beings form a distinct community of reciprocal moral obligation, and that giving people the regard they are due simply as human requires a combination of respect for their capacities as agents and concern for their vulnerability to suffering. The demand for humane regard, as I call it, has shaped democratic reform movements, efforts to turn authoritarian regimes into democracies, and the international human rights movement that emerged after the Second World War (Moody-Adams 2022).

Extraordinary failures to extend humane regard confirm its importance to the pursuit of justice. This became clear in the aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd, especially in the 2021 trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. In that trial, the prosecution needed to establish that Chauvin was guilty of the unlawful use of deadly force because, even as a suspected counterfeiter, George Floyd was a human being entitled to due process of law. This project involved two tasks. The first was to provide a humanizing narrative of Floyd’s life. But the second was to counter defence denials that George Floyd was subject to human suffering and pain.

The defence never claimed that Floyd was less than human, even though the infamous notion of ‘No Humans Involved’ often informs policing in urban America.¹ Instead, Floyd was presented as beyond human—supposedly possessed of ‘superhuman’ strength, ferocity, and pain tolerance, and unlikely to be subdued without extreme force. The prosecution’s closing argument insisted that there is ‘no such thing as a superhuman’, and stressed that Mr Floyd was ‘Just a human, just a man, lying on the pavement being pressed upon, desperately crying out. A grown man, crying out for his mother. A human being’ (Sleicher 2021). Prosecutors presumed that if the jury could be brought to acknowledge Floyd’s humanity, they could be convinced to trust what were, most likely, their initial reactions to images they had seen on video: ‘This case is exactly what you thought when you saw it first, when you saw that video. … It’s exactly what you saw with your eyes. It’s exactly what you knew. … This wasn’t policing. This was murder’ (Sleicher 2021). One day later, on 20 April 2021, the jury agreed.

The prosecution’s efforts thus enabled the ‘look’ of recognition to which Diamond refers. This look has been described by literary scholar Courtney Baker as ‘humane insight’: a way of looking that

seeks knowledge about the humanity of [a] person. It is an ethics-based look that imagines the body that is seen to merit all the protections due to all human bodies. … It is a look that turns a benevolent eye, recognizes violations of human dignity, and bestows or articulates the desire for actual protection. (Baker 2015, p. 5)

Successful efforts to produce humane insight typically draw on the capacity for sympathetic imagination—the capacity, as Adam Smith explains it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), ‘either to conceive or to be affected by’ what the other experiences, especially in response to suffering. Since it can be difficult to engage sympathetic imagination with dispassionate statements of facts, prosecutors in Chauvin’s trial wisely offered a humanizing narrative and vigorous reminders that Floyd was a human being subject to pain.

In light of the verdict in that trial, it is hard not to be troubled by the contemporary sceptical project known as critical post-humanism (Wolfe 2009; Braidotti 2013). This work exhorts us to reject the liberal humanism that emerged from the Enlightenment, on the grounds that a range of social injustices and moral evils have been inevitable consequences of accepting the doctrine. Critical post-humanists focus on the idea of ‘a universal humanity’: the notion that there is some characteristic, or set of characteristics, in virtue of which human beings form a distinct community of reciprocal obligation, and which can justify claims that we possess a moral value not possessed by non-human entities. This idea is said to rest on a deeply flawed interpretation of the world that presumes indefensible dualisms (of mind and body, and humanity and nature), wrongly assigns privileged status to reason and to groups allegedly possessing the largest share, and asserts a human exceptionalism that ignores obligations to non-human animals and rejects responsibility to care for the environment.

Some critics acknowledge that these commitments are only part of the story. Thus feminist philosopher Rosa Braidotti contends that although liberal humanism has been ‘complicitous with genocides and crimes on the one hand’, it has sometimes been ‘supportive of enormous hopes and aspirations to freedom on the other’ (2013, p. 16). But drawing on the ‘anti-humanism’ of philosophers such as Foucault, Irigaray and Deleuze, Braidotti insists that we can avoid complicity with the worst of liberal humanism only by rejecting humanism altogether.

Yet some thinkers who have accused liberal humanism of complicity in racism, colonialism and imperialism nonetheless defend broadly humanist aspirations for a world that acknowledges equal human worth and protects human freedom. Two important examples are Frantz Fanon ([1961] 1965) and literary critic Edward Said (1994). To be sure, Fanon was adamant that realizing the relevant aspirations would require a humanism radically different from the racialized humanism used to justify colonialism, imperialism and human subjugation. In The Wretched of the Earth, he insisted that articulating a genuinely liberatory humanism would require ‘not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonized man’, and he urged that ‘this new humanity’ would have to ‘define a new humanism both for itself and for others’ ([1961] 1965, pp. 197–8). But Fanon continued to value the notion of a universal human community bound by robust ties of reciprocal moral obligation.

A few decades later, Said argued in his preface to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Orientalism that ‘humanism is the only, and … the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history’ (Said 1994). Said went on to defend the constructive possibilities of what I call reflective humanism, which seeks a richly textured understanding of human beings in all their complexity and diversity, yet acknowledges the human commonality revealed in universal yearnings for self-determining action and in the human vulnerability to suffering. On my view, an implicit commitment to reflective humanism has been a powerful driving force of most progressive social movements (Moody-Adams 2022).

Critical post-humanists may object that any attempt to create a world shaped by reflective humanism can never be more than a fool’s errand, given the power of liberal humanism to legitimize institutions and practices which seek to deny some groups membership in the human community and extend downgraded membership to others. But progressive social movements have welcomed the challenge of defining and implementing reflective humanism—asserting their membership in the human community as a means of ‘reclaiming’ the idea of the human.² They may plausibly wonder whether calls to abandon this project reflect a political quietism that will necessarily preserve the unjust status quo. In light of this concern, I defend a two-pronged thesis, urging (1) that social movement efforts to reclaim the concept of ‘the human’—by enacting reflective humanism—are collectively rational, and (2) that reflective humanism is morally preferable to any post-humanism because, as Kieran Setiya argues, humanism has consistently underwritten the most morally compelling objections to racism, sexism, and other forms of injustice (2018, p. 452).

§ii defends the claim of collective rationality by exploring the means through which we can produce humane insight and challenge liberal humanism’s morally problematic consequences. §iii defends reflective humanism’s moral commitments by heeding Mary Midgley’s call to resist the ‘lure’ of seeking ‘a simple distinction’ between human beings and non-human animals (2005a, p. 61). This allows us to assert the moral claims of humanity without privileging reason, or repudiating nature or ‘the body’. We can thereby acknowledge many valuable ways to be human, even as we affirm morally substantive connections between human and non-human domains. §iv argues that the existence of these connections does not mean that human beings are not morally exceptional, although the ways in which we are exceptional do not justify liberal humanism’s moral hubris. Yet if we are to remedy the moral havoc to which the hubris of liberal humanism has often led, we must acknowledge and cultivate human capacities to imagine a better world and to act on imagined possibilities in the service of moral repair and moral progress.

II

Humane Insight and the Path of Reflective Humanism. I have claimed that it is collectively rational for progressive social movements to try to redefine—and so reclaim—the concept ‘human being’ as part of asserting their claims to membership in the human community. This is because virtually all social injustice, and a great deal of moral evil more generally, involve efforts to dehumanize people who are their targets. To dehumanize a person or group of persons is to ‘regard, represent, or treat’ them as though they are not human.³ Put more precisely, to dehumanize is to deny, or affect ignorance of, some beings’ membership in the human community of reciprocal obligation. Contrary to some accounts, dehumanization is not simply a matter of treating people as though they are less than human.⁴ As I noted at the outset, dehumanization sometimes involves regarding, representing or treating people as somehow beyond human, and thus not deserving of the protections due to human beings (Waytz, Hoffman and Trawalter 2014).

Yet whatever the mechanisms by which dehumanization occurs, it always has the same goal: to deny, or affect ignorance of, some people’s membership in the human community of reciprocal obligation. Sociologist Helen Fein contends that this is why large-scale dehumanization is so often a prelude to genocide, through a process—sometimes centuries long—in which the group that will go on to perpetrate genocidal crimes declares the targeted group outside ‘that circle of people with reciprocal obligations to protect each other’ (Fein 1979, p. 4). But dehumanization is not only a prelude to genocide: it is often a central element in ongoing social systems that stigmatize, marginalize and subjugate non-dominant groups—sometimes for centuries.

The locution ‘deny or affect ignorance of’ is important because, as Aquinas observed, in a great deal of moral wrongdoing, the wrongdoers are also guilty of choosing not to know what they can and should know about the demands of morality (Aquinas 1947, I–II, Q. 6, Art. 8, ‘Whether Ignorance Causes Involuntariness?’). Aquinas did not develop the concept of affected ignorance in detail. But I have argued that there are many varieties of affected ignorance, at least two of which are commonly used in projects of dehumanization (Moody-Adams 1994). In one of these varieties, people rely on elaborate linguistic deceptions to mask the reality of dehumanizing activities. Consider how the phrase ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ allowed many Americans to effectively ‘avert their glance’ from the fact that the US response to 9/11 relied on torture (Moody-Adams 1994, p. 301). In a second variety, affected ignorance involves active refusals to acknowledge causal connections between certain actions (including one’s own) and serious harm to targeted victims. In the early 1960s, an experiment conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram showed—contrary to Milgram’s interpretation—just how easily ordinary people can affect ignorance of others’ humanity and of their own connection to dehumanizing harm (Milgram 1965).⁵

In fact, the tendency to affect ignorance of others’ humanity is surprisingly widespread. It is thus regrettable that we can rarely rely on discursive arguments alone to combat it. But as the Chauvin trial confirmed, an engaging narrative may prompt recognition of others’ humanity, and even non-fiction may be effective if it frames the facts in a compelling fashion. In nineteenth-century America, slave narratives became a critical element of the abolitionist movement (Moody-Adams 2022), and in Victorian England Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843) framed dehumanizing tendencies of the Industrial Revolution in a manner that captured the attention of social reformers. In the twenty-first century, ‘hashtag activism’ in the #MeToo movement became a powerful means of showing that sexual assault and sexual harassment are often devastating forms of dehumanization.

Of course, fictional narratives often generate humane insight more effectively than non-fiction. Well-known instances of this phenomenon have been produced by protest novels and ‘muckraking’ fiction such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s challenge to chattel slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Upton Sinclair’s attack, in The Jungle (1906), on dehumanizing conditions in the American meatpacking industry. Yet sometimes the most powerful denunciations of dehumanization emanate from fiction that resists characterization as protest or muckraking. Toni Morrison’s fiction—perhaps especially her novel Beloved (1987)—provides an important example. Morrison was adamant that ‘certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that … only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination’ (Morrison 2019, p. ix). Yet she cautioned that the best art does not simply seek to turn sorrow into meaning but invites us ‘to know beauty and to solicit it from even the most tragic of circumstances’ (2019, p. 53).

But sometimes engaging moral imagination requires visual depictions of human suffering, and there is evidence that paintings depicting such suffering can produce humane insight. Consider the influence of Turner’s Slave Ship (1840), Picasso’s Guernica (1937), and Kerry James Marshall’s Heirlooms and Accessories (2002). Yet as Susan Sontag urged in On Photography, the invention of photography dramatically changed the ‘ethics of seeing’. Photography ‘enlarges our notion of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe’—often by bringing urgent and immediate news ‘of some unsuspected zone of misery’ (Sontag 1977, p. 17). Sontag cautions that even when we can plausibly claim that a photograph has determinate ethical content, that content is always ‘fragile’ (1977, p. 21). Repeated viewings, or the passage of time, may diminish a photograph’s power to produce humane insight. Sontag also reminds us that ‘what determines the possibility of being affected morally by photographs is the existence of a relevant political consciousness’, because ‘photographs do not explain, they acknowledge’ (1977, p. 111).

Regrettably, photography is often most effective when it confronts us with great suffering, such as casualties of war, natural disasters, or human brutality. A common worry is that such images may implicate the photographer—and possibly the viewer—in rituals of dehumanization, because even when photography aims to produce ethical seeing, there is always a risk that it will aestheticize and objectify the suffering person being depicted (Moody-Adams 2022, p. 89). Despite this risk, Martin Luther King believed that disseminating photographs of racist brutality was an indispensable part of seeking racial justice. But he remained ambivalent about using images of brutality toward children—even though, in May 1963, some of the US Government’s most robust responses to segregation came in response to just such images.

Eight years earlier, an especially vicious case of racist brutality towards a child provided an unanticipated occasion to document the terror and violence that often confronted African Americans in the Deep South. In August of 1955, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago named Emmett Till was lynched and murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi. When his body was returned to his Chicago family, his mother Mamie Till insisted on an open-casket funeral and invited the world—including photojournalists--to view the terrible evidence of brutality (Baker 2015, pp. 72–6). Unsurprisingly, the resulting photographs failed to produce humane insight in the jurors who acquitted Emmett’s murderers. But the images helped to galvanize opposition to segregation, especially among African Americans.

Yet visual depictions of such cases can generate humane insight only if they lead the viewer to acknowledge the full reality of racist violence. Dana Schutz’s controversial painting, Open Casket, depicting Emmett Till in death, was diminished by Schutz’s failure to appreciate this fact. Her painting came to international attention when it was displayed at the 2017 Biennial at New York’s Whitney Museum, and became the subject of vigorous critical attacks. Schutz eventually responded to her critics:

I don’t know what it is like to be black in America, but I do know what it is like to be a mother. Emmett was Mamie Till’s only son. The thought of anything happening to your child is beyond comprehension. Their pain is your pain. My engagement with this image was through empathy with his mother. (Kennedy 2017)

But Schutz’s statement clearly detaches Emmett’s murder from relevant historical fact: in 1955, the possibility of something terrible happening to an African American travelling in the deep south was hardly ‘beyond comprehension’. The statement also reveals troubling ignorance of Mamie Till’s well-known insistence that, despite her personal pain, her son’s death was a collective loss that called for collective resistance to violent white supremacy. Yet the Whitney was right to protect artistic freedom by exhibiting Open Casket for the duration of the Biennial. That decision also provided a crucial opportunity to reflect on the ethics of seeing, confirming that an image can sharpen moral imagination only when framed by adequate understanding of the suffering it claims to depict.

Ironically, at roughly the same time that Mamie Till challenged the world to consider how the ethics of seeing should shape depictions of human suffering, the photographer Edward Steichen sought to generate humane insight by means of a vastly different kind of project. In 1955, his efforts culminated in a monumental photographic exhibition, entitled The Family of Man, mounted at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (Steichen 1955). The exhibition consisted of 503 photographs, taken by 273 photographers from 68 different countries, to depict ‘the gamut of life from birth to death with emphasis on … daily relationships’, and to reveal ‘the universal elements and emotions and the oneness of human beings throughout the world’.⁶ Between 1955 and 1962, ten versions of the exhibition were presented to large and mostly approving audiences in 91 cities and 38 countries (Tiefentale 2018).

Yet the exhibition was less warmly received by some cultural critics. For instance, literary theorist Roland Barthes objected that the project was beholden to the ‘ambiguous myth of the human “community” which serves as an “alibi” to the worst excesses of “our humanism”’(Barthes [1957] 2013, p. 196). But although the project did not foreground the excesses of liberal humanism, neither did it ignore the human suffering it sometimes helped to cause—including the trauma of war and the hardships of the Great Depression. Moreover, at a time when the Holocaust was not yet the subject of widespread theoretical reflection, the exhibition included a chilling photograph of Jews being led from the Warsaw Ghetto (Menand 2021). We can thus understand why one contemporary critic has described the exhibition as a ‘visual Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (Azoulay 2013).

But as Max Horkheimer wrote, when the exhibition opened in Frankfurt in 1958, the real power of the project was not what it posited about rights, but its capacity to serve as ‘a symbol of the common bonds among human beings that are shared in spite of many … differences’—that is, to serve as ‘a symbol of the identity of human beings in their non-identity’ (Horkheimer 1958, p. 49). Moreover, the exhibition also affirmed the interdependence that unites diverse members of the human family. A few years later, Martin Luther King described this interdependence: ‘we have to live together … a family unduly separated in ideas, culture, and interests who, because we can never again live without each other, must learn somehow … to live with each other’ (King [1964] 2013). These observations from Horkheimer and King suggest that Steichen’s claim that the project depicted the family of man embodies a rich and compelling insight. Adapting Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance, we can say that, as in any ordinary family, members of the human family are connected by a series of overlapping features rather than by a single ‘essence’ common to every member. Far from providing an alibi for liberal humanism, Steichen’s project thus revealed the need for a reflective humanism that seeks to understand the nature and sources of human complexity and diversity.

III

Resisting the ‘Lure of the Simple Distinction’. The effort to produce that understanding cannot leave our concept of ‘the human’ unchanged. It will also challenge epistemic complacency about the kinds of inquiry likely to illuminate the concept. Three considerations are important here. First, as Mary Midgley argued, if we are to take human complexity and diversity seriously, we must relinquish the notion that simplicity is always an explanatory virtue (2005b, p. 294). The best explanations of what it is to be human will affirm complexity and diversity rather than seek to eliminate them. But second, we cannot understand specific dimensions of human diversity and complexity unless we reject the idea that the ability to reason is the most important human characteristic, and that reason is what sets us apart from other animate beings. As Midgley urges, when we stop looking for a simple distinction between humans and all other animals, we can acknowledge that what is special about human beings is rooted in ‘a rich and complex arrangement of powers and qualities’—some of which we share with at least some non-human animals (Midgley 2005a, p. 61). Third, resisting the lure of the simple distinction allows us to reject one of the most troubling aspects of liberal humanism, summed up in Hegel’s infamous claim that inhabitants of ‘Africa proper’ were ahistorical examples of ‘animal man’. For the reflective humanist, every human being is fully animal, and no single characteristic of the human animal supports the hierarchy of animate beings that Hegel (along with many other thinkers) claimed to find.

Midgley convincingly urges that resisting the lure of the simple distinction may stave off the ‘panic’ some people experience when they discover that some non-human animals possess abilities once thought to constitute the essence of what it is to be human. Indeed, reflective humanists can contemplate similarities between human and non-human animals with a sense of wonder, rather than a sense of being diminished. Some especially important similarities have been revealed by research regarding (unexpectedly convergent) behaviour amongst sperm whales and elephants. Apart from human beings, no other large mammals have been as ecologically successful as sperm whales and elephants—a fact that suggests that these animals have sophisticated communication and social structures, and a remarkable capacity (when not decimated by human hunting) to adapt to harsh aquatic and terrestrial environments (Weilgart, Whitehead and Payne 1996). It is surely a virtue of reflective humanism that it encourages us to calmly accept the plausibility of these observations.

But just how much human diversity and complexity can we acknowledge and still defend the idea that human beings form a distinctive natural, as well as moral, community? The answer to this question is ‘a great deal’. In fact, diversity and complexity are inescapable features of many basic human traits and capacities. For example, a consensus has now emerged that we should reject conventional assumptions that imagination is a single mental faculty performing a single kind of mental activity, and instead presume the heterogeneity of imagination. It is only by presuming such heterogeneity that we can justify using the word ‘imagination’—as we typically do—to refer to a wide range of mental processes and activities, and a vast array of imaginative products (Strawson 1970; Stevenson 2003; Kind 2013). Acknowledging the heterogeneity of imagination becomes even more important when we consider that some people lack elements of what was once presumed to be the ‘essential’ set of imaginative processes and activities. For instance, between 3% and 5% of human beings lack the capacity to ‘see with the mind’s eye’. They are said to have aphantasia: an inability to ‘internally’ visualize things that are either not immediately perceived or are (as yet) ‘mere’ possibilities (Zeman, Dewar and Della Sala 2015). Some people develop aphantasia after a stroke or serious brain injury. Others are born with aphantasia, and may not realize for years that many people visualize things in their mind. Most surprisingly, a significant percentage of people with aphantasia are accomplished visual artists. One prominent example is the animator and illustrator Glen Keane, who created some of the best-known characters in such animated Disney films as The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast (Zeman 2021).

The existence of aphantasia has three important implications for reflective humanism. First, it suggests that traditional understandings of artistic invention are woefully incomplete. In The Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari attributed to Leonardo da Vinci the idea that visual artists work by ‘searching for inventions in their minds and forming those perfect ideas which their hands then express’ (Vasari 1991, p. 290). Yet Keane has said that when he created his most famous characters, he did not first see the characters ‘in his mind’s eye’ and then reproduce those visions on paper. Instead, he reports beginning with a conceptual understanding of various figures, both human and animal, and then imagining hybrid figures in the drawing of them.

But second, the fact that conventional wisdom failed to comprehend how someone like Keane might imagine new characters suggests that we should be wary of conventional wisdom about other human powers. For instance, Newton compellingly maintained that he stood on the shoulders of giants, and we may want to ask whether sophisticated conceptual thought is ever a genuinely individual process. Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that when ‘multiple cognitive systems work together, group intelligence can emerge that goes beyond what each individual is capable of’ (Sloman and Fernbach 2017, p. 107). If this view is plausible—as I take it to be—reflective humanism should resist the lure of excessive individualism about intellectual achievement.

Third, and perhaps most important, the fact that Keane imagined his characters through such an unexpected process suggests that reflective humanism should be sceptical of dismissive assumptions about people who are generally—even severely—cognitively impaired. Jeff McMahan has sought to defend such assumptions, arguing that people with serious cognitive impairments are mostly incapable of having lives worth living. He contends that ‘individuals born with only very rudimentary cognitive and emotional capacities necessarily have a highly restricted capacity for well-being. For the range of forms and levels of well-being that are in principle accessible to an individual is determined by that individual’s cognitive and emotional capacities and potential’ (McMahan 1996, p. 7). McMahan presumes that a robust capacity for well-being demands sophisticated conceptual thought—about temporality, for example, and about how to pursue different kinds of interests—and that such thought demands complex verbal capacities. But animal behaviourist Temple Grandin (2022) convincingly argues that, whether in human beings or in non-human animals, visual thinking can be remarkably complex and discerning. Grandin also notes that when speech comes late in a person’s development, as it often does with autism, visual thinking usually functions as the person’s dominant mode of thinking, and learning language involves a complex process of ‘translating’ from their fundamental mode of cognizing the world. Just as imagination follows an unexpected path in people with aphantasia, cognition often works unexpectedly in people who are primarily visual thinkers.

Yet if visual thinking can be complex and discerning, is it possible that someone who never becomes capable of verbal communication might still be capable of living a good life and having a discerning appreciation of that fact, as well as having a strong personal sense of well-being? Eva Feder Kittay (2005, 2019) has compellingly answered this question in the affirmative, based in part on her experience as the parent of a cognitively impaired child. Her approach suggests that, like reading a powerful novel, experience can sometimes be the source of humane insight that may not be accessible through any other route. In contrast, McMahan‘s views seem to emanate from a refusal to seek humane insight into the lives of people with serious cognitive deficiencies. Kittay plausibly suggests that McMahan wrongly portrays cognitively impaired people as radically ‘other’, in ways that yield problematic caricatures of their lives. But it must also be stressed that McMahan’s arguments simply rationalize unreflective prejudice against certain ways of being human, and therefore cannot rationally justify the claim that the lives in question are not morally worthy of robust protection.

Such arguments have wrongly been claimed to justify all sorts of injustice and moral evil—not simply by reference to cognitive deficiencies, but also racial designations, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and sexual orientation. In the 1930s, Nazi projects driven by such rationalizations began with large-scale forced sterilization of people alleged to be ‘genetically unfit’ because of cognitive impairment. These projects led to large scale ‘euthanasia’ (so-called) of disabled people. This large-scale killing eventually led to the genocidal murder of six million Jews, and the systematic murder of hundreds of thousands of Roma people and vast numbers of gay and lesbian people. We may think that ‘it couldn’t happen here’ or now. But forced sterilization is not a thing of the past. Thirty-one US states and the District of Columbia have laws that allow permanent forced sterilizations of disabled people (National Women’s Law Center 2022). Precisely because it could ‘happen here’, we need a reflective humanism which offers a rich understanding of human diversity and the potential for rationally grounding demands for robust moral protection of that diversity.⁷

But these departures from liberal humanism discussed here are just a start on the larger project of articulating a comprehensive reflective humanism. Completing that project will demand new understandings of the connections between human beings and the non-human realm as a whole. I follow Midgley in presuming that these understandings will require a view akin to James Lovelock’s 1972 ‘Gaia hypothesis’ (see Lovelock 1979), positing that all organisms and their inorganic surroundings are parts of a complex self-regulating system (Midgley 2005c, pp. 349–52). Reflective humanists must reject the hubris that allowed liberal humanists to rationalize practices which have endangered vital ecosystems, and destroyed or greatly endangered many non-human animal species.

It is sometimes claimed that the best remedy for the moral hubris of liberal humanism is to grant legal personhood, and establish legal rights for ecosystems (Stone 2010) and animal species (Nussbaum 2022). There is even a campaign to treat large-scale destruction of the environment as a crime in international law, on the model of efforts to punish genocide and crimes against humanity (Surma 2021). Yet many of the most important moral obligations we have to non-human animals and the environment cannot be associated with a corresponding right (whether moral, or legal, or both). Moreover, even if some important obligations might be plausibly associated with rights ‘possessed’ by non-human animals, trees and oceans, the relevant rights would often conflict with presumed rights of humans, resulting in the same kind of tug-of-war between competing rights-claims that has been so unhelpful in debates about abortion. To avoid this outcome, reflective humanism must provide an account of obligation that acknowledges humanity as one element of a complex self-regulating system that cannot be sustained, and cannot sustain us, when we do not promote considerate and compassionate treatment of non-human animals and when we refuse responsible stewardship of the environment.

IV

Moral Exceptionalism without Moral Superiority. But rejecting the hubris of liberal humanism does not require us to deny that human beings are morally exceptional. To be sure, some non-human animals have capacities that are similar in kind to some capacities that help to produce human moral action. It seems clear, for instance, that many non-human animals think, and that their thinking draws on the capacity to interpret and thoughtfully manipulate their environment. Further, it seems likely that some non-human animals imagine novel events, and that they can imagine alternatives before they act. (Pfeiffer and Foster 2013; Hills 2019). Furthermore, some non-human animals engage in social cooperation that draws on these abilities (De Waal 2014).

Nonetheless, two facts about human beings suggest that human moral capacities are exceptional. First, human cooperation differs from cooperation amongst non-human animals in scale, range and quality. According to Frans de Waal, human cooperation is often more highly organized, and more hierarchically collaborative in the service of complex, large-scale projects, than anything involving other species. He explains this difference by noting that human beings have developed means of enforcing cooperation through rules requiring conformity and prescribing punishment for free riders (De Waal 2014). But second, although many non-human animals interpret the world, there is no evidence that they can subject their interpretations to sustained critical scrutiny, rather than simply reject or retain them in response to immediate demands of survival. Kenneth Burke allows that

all living organisms interpret many of the signs about them. Some trout, having snatched at a hook but having had the good luck to escape with a rip in his jaw, may even show by his wiliness thereafter that he can revise his critical appraisals … to form a new judgment, … a nicer discrimination between food and bait. (Burke 1984, p. 23)

Yet Burke plausibly insists that human beings can achieve something that even a sophisticated trout cannot, because human language provides an ‘experimental speculative technique’ that allows most humans to move beyond ‘criticism of experience to a criticism of criticism. We not only interpret the character of events … we may also interpret our interpretations’ (1984, p. 23).

On my view, what is morally exceptional about human beings emerges when we successfully combine the capacity ‘to interpret our interpretations’ with the capacity for highly organized, structurally complex cooperation. The combination proves most effective when we also draw on the human capacity for narrative imagination—by which I mean the capacity to shape and communicate our interpretations by means of narrative (Moody-Adams 2022). This allows us to imaginatively consider how new interpretations might help us reshape the world, and to compare consequences of the different social worlds we might make through new varieties of cooperative schemes. We can also imagine how our cooperative schemes might be devoted to morally reparative, as well as morally constructive, projects that non-human animals do not (and apparently cannot) contemplate. The human capacity to engage in these imaginative exercises and to realize imagined possibilities in the world fundamentally distinguishes us from non-humans.

It is also important that human cooperation depends upon widespread possession and exercise of the virtue of reciprocity, and that the processes by which we develop and display this virtue are extremely complex. As Lawrence Becker maintained, to reciprocate is ‘to respond to a benefit or harm in a way that restores and sustains equilibrium’, and in the context of human interaction this turns out to be an especially complex response (Becker 1986, p. 152). Becker contends, for instance, that ‘reciprocity does not initiate social exchanges, it completes them. Other dispositions are needed to get the process going’ (1986, p. 142). He argues, further, that although reciprocity is a fundamental virtue, virtues ‘come in clusters or not at all’. For Becker, reciprocity is at the centre of a cluster of virtues—including generosity, conviviality, empathy, and practical wisdom—that must work together if reciprocity is to reliably ‘enhance productive social interaction’ (1986, p. 150). Adding to the complexity posited by Becker, De Waal (2014) urges that human beings are capable of a kind of reciprocity not found among non-human animals, a robust reciprocity that involves extending sustained benefits to those who have never directly extended a benefit to us. This may explain why we seem to be the only species to engage in long-term, complex cooperation with ‘outsiders’ and ‘strangers’.

I contend that this robust reciprocity is a virtue that—like charity—must ‘begin at home’ before it can be spread ‘abroad’. That is, we must learn robust reciprocity among human beings before we can learn to extend it to non-humans. Indeed, it seems likely that robust reciprocity depends in part on distinctive aspects of human neurophysiology—including what social neuroscience describes as the capacity for ‘neural synchrony’ across people (Feldman 2007). Achieving this synchrony may also be essential to developing other components of that cluster of virtues (especially conviviality and empathy) within which reciprocity has a place. If correct, my speculation provides further grounds for thinking that the best model for membership in the human community is indeed the model of a family. For it is typically within families (broadly conceived) that we first experience neural synchrony—and learn to enjoy its results (Feldman 2007).

Of course, human beings sometimes misuse the capacities that are essential to praiseworthy conduct in order to commit moral wrongs—wrongs toward other human beings and non-human animals, as well as grave harm to the environment. This is why reflective humanism rejects any assumption of human moral superiority. Indeed, reflective humanism demands a balance between confidence in our capacity for moral good (and moral repair) and humility concerning our ability to create moral havoc and evil. We can achieve this balance only when we acknowledge that the demands of morality are not confined to extending humane regard, but also require attending to the needs, interests and claims of non-human animals, and enacting robust concern for the natural environment.

Yet a commitment to realizing humane regard remains a basic demand of reflective humanism. We fail to meet that demand when our actions, practices and institutions reflect what sociologist Sylvia Wynter called the ‘misrecognition of human kinship’ (Wynter 1994, p. 69). Returning to the example with which this paper began, George Floyd deserved humane regard simply as a member of the human family. The police abuse of force that took his life immorally and unlawfully failed to acknowledge his humanity. To be sure, realizing humane regard is not simply a matter of responding to injustice with humane insight. It demands legal, political and economic institutions in which people can choose and act without unwarranted coercion or violence and through which they can live relatively free from unnecessary pain and suffering. Yet as social movements have insisted, and as post-humanists forget, human beings will not be treated justly unless they are acknowledged as fully human—and as fully deserving of humane regard and its enabling conditions.⁸

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Footnotes