Although I have argued that human beings have assigned themselves to a lofty position in the hierarchy of nature, I have not explained what characteristics an entity must have in order to be regarded as human. I have been taking the category of the human for granted, but now we have got to find out what it means to say of some beings that they are human beings.
What are human beings? You might think that the answer to this question is obvious, because science has shown that to be human is to be a member of the species Homo sapiens. But the scientific literature is not so straightforward. It is reasonable to say that all Homo sapiens are human, but is it also right to say that all humans are Homo sapiens? Most paleoanthropologists equate being human with either being a member of a certain biological species—the species Homo sapiens—or with being a member of the genus Homo. But some prefer a very narrow definition of the human, restricting it to the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, and others think that all of the hominins that have existed since the moment our lineage parted ways with that of the chimpanzees should come under the human umbrella.1 So we have at least four possible “scientific” answers to the question “What are human beings?” And that is not the end of it, because even if the scientists managed to settle on the notion that to be a human is to be a member of genus Homo, we would still be in the dark because it is unclear which species belong to that genus. As paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall tells us,
You might … be tempted to imagine that, in the century and a half since Charles Darwin pointed out that we are joined to the rest of nature by common ancestry, science might have begun to make some progress toward a biological definition of the human genus. But if so, you would be doomed to disappointment. Scientists are still arguing vehemently over which ancient fossil human relatives should be included in the genus Homo. And they are doing so in the absence of any coherent idea of what the genus that includes our species Homo sapiens might reasonably be presumed to contain.2
Why is there so much scientific confusion about what humans are? One might think that it is because the fossil record is too sketchy, and that science will be in a position to give us a definitive answer once enough remains are discovered. But it is a mistake to think that science can settle the question of what humans are. The problem would still be there even if we had a complete and detailed fossil record of our ancestral lineage, because the question “What is a human being?” is a philosophical question rather than a scientific one.
We humans are inveterate taxonomists who order our picture of the world by sorting organisms into typological boxes. Present-day scientific taxonomies—the ones presented in biology texts—were built on foundations laid by older, prescientific ones. And these prescientific frameworks for parsing the lifeworld were driven by the psychological biases that move us to carve up the messy profusion of life forms into discrete, essentialized, natural kinds.
Essentialism gives us a false picture of the natural world, but it can be useful. “If psychological essentialism is bad metaphysics,” asked the psychologist Douglas Medin, “why should people act as if things had essences?” His answer was that “it may prove to be good epistemology.” Essentialism is bad metaphysics because post-Darwinian science has shown us that organisms do not come neatly packaged as essentialized kinds. But it is good epistemology because it allowed our ancestors to make inferences about the world that could mean the difference between success and failure, life and death. Dividing organisms into kinds, and extrapolating from the known to the unknown, allowed our forebears to distinguish the plants that are edible and those that are toxic, figure out where and when certain kinds predators might be lurking, and make educated guesses about where to find game. This sort of knowledge is not so vital for those of us who do our hunting and gathering in supermarkets, but it is indispensable for those that depend on nature’s wild bounty to survive.
The fact that our taxonomic instincts are rooted in psychological essentialism does not mean that folk taxonomies always depart from what science tells us about how nature is arranged. Sometimes the scientific classification of organisms into species mirrors folk classifications with breathtaking fidelity. For instance, when the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr visited the Arfak mountains of New Guinea in 1928 to study the wildlife there, he found that the indigenous New Guineans classified native birds into 136 species, and that these corresponded almost exactly to the 137 species identified by ornithologists. But folk taxonomies and scientific taxonomies do not always fit together so tidily. It is plain to see why people, impressed by certain similarities, might think that whales are fish, but it is far more perplexing that the Karam of New Guinea, the land that Mayr visited, classify the large, flightless Cassowary not as a bird.3
In recent decades, the ways that scientists carve up the biosphere into kinds of organisms has increasingly parted ways with everyday taxonomic intuitions. Biologists have become less and less concerned with readily observable morphological characteristics and more and more concerned with tracing evolutionary patterns of descent via the microscopic lens of molecular genetics. This shift has transformed the scientific image of biological taxa and their relationships to one another. Science now teaches us that the Nile crocodile—a massive, lumbering, predatory, semiaquatic beast—is more closely related to the miniscule bee hummingbird (which weighs in at less than a tenth of an ounce) than it is to the world’s largest lizard, the fearsome Komodo dragon (locally referred to as a “land crocodile”), which can polish off a whole pig for dinner. In fact, the group of organisms formerly known as “reptiles” has, in effect, been taxonomized out of existence.
This is typical of how science proceeds. The more developed a science becomes, the more deeply scientific research explores the fundamental nature of things, the further it departs from ordinary, intuitive, commonsense conceptions of the world. That is why in biological taxonomy, as well in many other matters, we defer to science when we want to know what is really real. Science is in the business of representing the world in a way that lines up with its objective structure. In mapping the fundamental structure of the world, science focuses on natural kinds: physical kinds like quarks and photons, chemical kinds like oxygen and radium, and biological kinds like species and genera. Therefore, a large part of the role of science is correcting mistaken views about the kinds of things that populate the natural world.
One way that science accomplishes this is by distinguishing natural kinds from the products of human invention. There are various kinds of invented kinds. Some, such as unicorns and demons, are purely imaginary. They are nonnatural in Mill’s first sense of “natural.” They are fictional kinds. Others, such as chairs, highways, and expressionist paintings, are real artifacts that are fashioned out of natural (in Mill’s second sense) stuff. These are physically assembled kinds. Still other cognitively assembled kinds are gerrymandered collections of items belonging to different natural kinds. They are things grouped together on the basis of the role that they play in human life rather than because of their natural properties.
The concept of cognitively assembled kinds is especially important for understanding what it means to be human, so I will dwell on it a bit longer to make sure what I am talking about is clear. The category “weed” is an example of a cognitively assembled kind. What makes a plant a weed has nothing to do with its biological properties. There is nothing, biologically speaking, that all weeds have in common but no other plants share. The category “weed” is assembled from a whole variety of plants that do not have any special botanical properties in common. They are grouped together only by our attitude toward them. What makes a plant a weed is that it is a wild variety growing in a place that is reserved for cultivation. Consequently, the very same plant that is a weed if it is growing in a flower bed may not be a weed if it is growing in a meadow. Although the plants that we call “weeds” would still be around in the absence of the human practice of horticulture, the category “weed” would vanish. Or, to put the same point differently, if human beings were to disappear, the plants that are weeds would no longer be weeds.
To understand what weeds are, you have got to understand human social practices. Superintelligent alien biologists who did not know that Earthlings cultivate plants would be perplexed by the concept “weed.” Presented with a collection of plant specimens, and told that these are all weeds, the aliens would be at a loss to understand what on earth these plants have in common. The same principle is true of many other categories that are important to human beings, such as pets, vegetables, and creepy crawlies. These are all cognitively assembled kinds.
Cognitively assembled kinds are not always recognized as such. Sometimes they are mistaken for natural kinds. Racial groupings are examples. Most people seem to think that races are biologically meaningful groupings of human beings, and that every member of a race has some important biological property that sets them apart from everyone who does not share their common racial identity. However, as I explained in Chapter 3, there is a scholarly near-consensus that human races are inventions rather than biologically meaningful categories. Racial categories are like weeds in that they consist of biologically and culturally diverse groups of people that are united by a name (“Black,” “White,” “Asian,” or whatever) but not by shared, underlying, natural properties that would consolidate them as a natural kind.
The category “human” is also widely assumed to be a natural kind. But is “human” really a natural kind, or is it an invented kind? This question has important implications for understanding the phenomenon of dehumanization. When people dehumanize others, they deny those others’ humanity. So, unless we are able to decide what it means to think of others as human beings, we will never be able to form a clear idea of what is going on when we dehumanize them.
Whatever its ultimate metaphysical status, “human” is a folk category. Unlike homo, the Latin word from which it is derived, it is not part of any strictly scientific vocabulary. Of course, scientists use the word “human” in scientific contexts, just as they use many other vernacular terms. But that does not make “human” a scientific term any more than their using the term “weed” makes “weed” a scientific term. Getting clear about the fact that “human” is a folk category helps us to see what is really going on when a scientist says that being human is the same thing as belonging to the species Homo sapiens.
When scientists claim that humans are Homo sapiens (and vice versa), they are making a claim about the relationship between terms taken from two separate vocabularies. They are making the claim that the vernacular term “human beings” and scientific term “Homo sapiens” name exactly the same kind of animal—the kind of animal that you and I are. As I explained at the start of this chapter, there is no scientific consensus about which biological taxon maps on to the folk category “human.” Given this, we can now ask a deeper question: Is there any possible empirical evidence that would establish that the category “human” corresponds to one biological taxon rather than another? Are there any observations that scientists could make that would establish that being human equals being a member of the species Homo sapiens? The answer to this question is “no.” There is not and cannot be any such evidence because questions about the relation between folk categories like “human” and scientific categories like “Homo sapiens” are philosophical ones, and part of what makes a question a philosophical question is precisely that it cannot be settled by observing facts about the world. We could know all of the facts about the anatomy, physiology, and behavior of members of the hominin species Homo ergaster, for example, and still not know whether these ancestors of ours were human beings.
Perhaps, then, philosophers are better equipped than scientists are to answer the question of what it means to be human. For the most part, philosophers regard the concept of the human as unproblematic. For example, the burgeoning literature on human nature rarely if ever addresses the question of what sorts of beings count as human beings. And “transhumanist” writings, which talk about how the use of technological enhancements may catapult us into a posthuman condition, are not explicit about what the humanity that we are supposedly leaving behind really is. Often, rather than concerning themselves with the question of what humans are, philosophers pursue questions about how we should treat other human beings—questions about the basis for human rights and human dignity, and whether we have moral special obligations to one another that we do not have to other animals. In these cases, philosophers often take the concept of the human for granted, perhaps assuming that it has already been settled by science.
In centuries past, the question of what humans are had a lot more traction. In the Aristotelian tradition, to be human was to be rationally ensouled—that is, to be equipped participate in a rational form of life. Over time, the Aristotelian conception of the rational soul morphed into the more otherworldly Christian conception of the rational soul—a nonmaterial part of the person. Consequently, being human was equated with possessing a such a soul.4 Souls are invisible and undetectable, and therefore readily deniable. This fact gave European and American slaveholders an easy way to claim that the Africans whom they enslaved, and the indigenous people whom they oppressed, were not really human. Spanish intellectuals claimed that the native people of the Americas lacked fully rational souls, and were therefore barbarians who could legitimately be enslaved. But some English colonists (and later, some Americans) extended this line of thinking further, by claiming that enslaved Africans did not have souls at all, and therefore were not human beings.
The writings of the seventeenth-century Anglican cleric Morgan Godwyn, whom I mentioned in Chapter 4, are an important source of information on this topic. Godwyn, who had been John Locke’s student at Oxford University, traveled to Virginia in 1666, and aroused the hostility of planters there by baptizing Black slaves and Indians. Next, he sailed to Barbados, where he continued advocating for admitting Black people to the Anglican Church, against the wishes of those who enslaved them. He also fiercely condemned the dehumanization of Africans and atrocities that White colonists inflicted on these people.5 Godwyn testified that English colonists held a “disingenuous position” that “the Negros, though in their Figure they carry some resemblances of Manhood, yet are indeed no men,” and that they advocated “Hellish Principles … that Negros are Creatures Destitute of Souls, to be ranked among Brute Beasts and treated accordingly.”6 In that time and place, to be human meant having an immaterial soul, and conceiving of others as subhuman beings entailed denying that they possessed souls.
Few philosophers nowadays give any credence to the idea that human beings possess immaterial souls. Contemporary philosophers mostly believe that human beings are, like all other organisms, purely physical beings. Even though they do not pay much attention to the concept of humanness, philosophers pay a great deal of attention to the nearby notion of “personhood.” Although the term “person” is an ancient one (as far as anyone knows, it was the Roman philosopher Epictetus who introduced it), the idea of personhood as a distinctive metaphysical status did not come into its own until the seventeenth century, and by the twentieth century it had eclipsed the notion of humanness in the philosophical literature.
Present-day ideas about personhood are mostly indebted to the work of John Locke, who defined a person as “a thinking, intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places.” The philosopher Charles Taylor gives a good general summary of the received view of personhood as it is understood today. “To be a person in the full sense,” he writes, “you have to be an agent, a being that can thus make plans for your life, one who also holds values in virtue of which different such plans seem better or worse, and who is capable of choosing between them.” Although there is a lot quibbling about the details of the concept of personhood, especially by those who want to extend personhood to include other animals, the general point on which they virtually all agree is that “to regard an entity as a person is to attribute a special kind of value to that entity.”7
What is the difference, if any, between being human and being a person? Generally speaking, philosophers think of humanness as an unproblematically biological property (they assume that human equals Homo sapiens), but they conceive of personhood as carrying a special moral status. With this in mind, it is easy to see why many philosophers want to distinguish biological humanness from moral personhood. For a being to have a special kind of intrinsic value, it is reasonable to suppose that there is something about that being—some attribute or set of attributes—that accounts for their specialness. After all, when we say that someone is beautiful, or talented, or malevolent there is got to be something about them—something about how they appear or behave—that makes them beautiful, or talented, or malevolent. Imagine someone sincerely claiming that a certain person is beautiful, but also denying that there is anything about that person that makes them beautiful. This would be so incoherent as to be incomprehensible. Likewise, those who think that to be a person is to have a special moral value need to say what it is about being a person that underwrites that value. But it is difficult to see how the mere fact that an entity belongs to a particular evolutionary lineage can do this moral job.
And that is where the trouble starts.
If being a member of a certain species or genus is not enough to make an entity a person, then what is? Fans of the concept of personhood tend to believe that some extra, nonbiological ingredient needs to be added. And as soon as you specify characteristics that persons have and nonpersons do not, you inevitably exclude some members of our species from that group.
This conclusion is not always unwelcome. Consider abortion. Human fetuses are, by definition, human (in the sense of being Homo sapiens), but it is easy to make the case that they do not have characteristics that would make them persons, and therefore that they do not merit the moral consideration that we accord fully-formed humans. However, the claim that some humans are not persons, and for that reason do not merit the degree of moral respect that persons merit, was also the foundation for Hitler’s euthanasia program and various other atrocities. So, anyone who distinguishes biological humanness from moral personhood is faced with the difficult problem of setting out criteria for personhood that do not exclude the “right” individuals. To avoid such exclusionary consequences, some philosophers embrace one or another version of a very abstract notion of personhood. Typically, the claim is that personhood resides in rationality, autonomy, infinite worth, or some such attribute. However, in such cases, the meanings of these words float away from their everyday usage in a way that renders them vacuous or absurd. A person who is imprisoned, enslaved, or who lives in a totalitarian state is still said to be autonomous; one who habitually behaves with irrational abandon is nevertheless said to be rational, and one whose society deems them to be unworthy of life is still said to have ultimate worth. The idea is that the deep attributes that make us persons transcend the merely contingent facts about our psychology and circumstances. This is supposed to ensure that, at a minimum, all human beings count as persons. As Taylor put it, “We believe that it would be utterly wrong and unfounded to draw the boundaries any narrower than around the whole human race.” He continues, “Should anyone propose to do so, we should immediately ask what distinguished those left in from those left out. And we should seize on this distinguishing characteristic in order to show that it has nothing to do with commanding respect.”8
But this takes us right back to square one. If all and only humans are persons, the category of the “human” turns out to be a moral category after all.9 As Peter Singer astutely points out,
Faced with a situation in which they saw a need for some basis for the moral gulf that is still commonly thought to separate human beings and animals, but unable to find any concrete difference between human beings and animals that would do this without undermining the equality of human beings, philosophers tended to waffle. They resorted to high-sounding phrases like “the intrinsic dignity of the human individual.” They talked of “the intrinsic worth of all men” … as if all men (humans?) had some unspecified worth that other beings do not have. Or they would say that human beings, and only human beings, are “ends in themselves” while “everything other than a person can only have value for a person.” … To introduce ideas of dignity and worth as a substitute for other reasons for distinguishing humans and animals is not good enough. Fine phrases are the last resource of those who have run out of arguments.10
If bare humanness has moral heft, and if being human is nothing more than belonging to a certain biological category, then the problem arises of explaining how belonging to a biological category can endow the members of it with a special moral status.
To dehumanize others is conceive of them as less than human, and to humanize them is to conceive of them as human. It follows that the question of what it is for an individual to be human is less important for understanding dehumanization than the question of what it is to attribute humanness to that person. So, understanding dehumanization requires us to take a psychological stance toward claims about humanness.
Psychologist Nick Haslam, whose work I discussed briefly in Chapter 2, has an influential thesis about attributions of humanness. He proposes that we think of others as human to the extent that they are thought to possess certain psychological characteristics. Uniquely human traits are, as the name suggests, characteristics that only humans have. These are supposed to distinguish human beings from all other animals. Haslam lists civility, refinement, moral sensibility, rationality, and maturity as prime examples of uniquely human traits. Human nature traits are “features that are typically, fundamentally, or essentially human, representing those attributes that form the core of the concept ‘human.’ ” Human nature traits do not have to be restricted to humans—they can be shared with nonhuman animals, but they are traits that we strongly associate with being human. Haslam lists emotionality, warmth, openness, agency, individuality, and depth as examples of human nature traits.11
Haslam and his coworkers gave subjects a list of eighty psychological traits and asked them whether each trait is an aspect of human nature or whether it is exclusively human. They were also interested in finding out whether psychological essentialism plays a role in how we think about humanness, so they asked participants some additional questions to determine whether subjects “essentialized” these traits. They predicted that “traits would be judged to be aspects of human nature to the extent that they were judged to be expressed consistently across situations, immutable, deeply rooted (inherent), and highly informative (inductively potent) about people who have them.”12 It turned out that there was a good deal of agreement that the more refined and sophisticated traits were classified uniquely human and that the other, cruder or more basic traits were classified as aspects of human nature. It also turned out that, according to the research protocol, human nature traits tended to be essentialized,13
Haslam draws on the distinction between causal essences and sortal essences in his account. As I have explained, causal essences are supposed to be hidden properties that only and all members of a natural kind possess, and which are causally responsible for the manifest, observable features that we associate with members of that kind. They are supposed to be concretely real, and located “inside” the objects that “have” them.
In contrast, sortal essences are “the set of defining characteristics that all and only members of a category share.”14 Sortal essences are the sum of the observable features that define category membership. They are not limited to natural kinds. Sortal essences are not possessed by individual things; they are not in any sense “inside” of those things but are rather the set of necessary and sufficient conditions that need to be satisfied in order for a thing to be assigned to a category. To say that anything that quacks, walks, and swims like a duck is therefore a duck is to specify the sortal essence of the category “duck,” whereas to say that there is something unobservable that all and only ducks possess, and which is normally responsible for these forms of quacking, walking, and swimming, is to specify its causal essence.
Haslam claims human nature traits are “highly essentialized” in the causal sense, but “uniquely human characteristics may embody a different sense of essence than human nature.” He goes on to say that “arguably they may be captured by Gelman and Hirschfeld’s (1999) concept of sortal essence.… Plato’s definition of human as ‘featherless biped’ exemplifies this sense of sortal essence: It distinguishes humans from other animals without any implication that featherlessness and bipedalism are core features of human nature. We therefore argue that uniquely human characteristics may represent the human essence in a sortal sense, consistent with infrahumanization theory, and human nature characteristics represent the essence in a natural kind sense.”15
There are multiple problems with this suggestion. First, the notion that traits can be causally essentialized is a category mistake. Recall that causal essences are supposed to be unobservable properties cause and explain traits. As such, they should not be conflated with the traits that they supposedly cause and explain. Second, Haslam’s proposal that only human nature traits—that is, traits that we share with other animals—are thought of as having a causal essence implies that we do not think of human beings as possessing a distinctively human causal essence. This is inconsistent both with the historical evidence that I have presented in earlier chapters (for example, the idea of the soul as a human essence) and with work on essentialistic misunderstandings of genetics—some of which Haslam has elsewhere endorsed.16 Third, if it is true that uniquely human traits constitute the sortal essence of the human—that is, if having such traits defines what it is to be human—then any being lacking those traits should be considered non- or subhuman. But human babies do not have these traits. They lack civility, refinement, moral sensibility, rationality, and maturity. And yet, human babies are considered to be human beings. Finally, Haslam’s account of humanness does not comport well with facts about dehumanization (or, in his terminology, facts about the animalistic form of dehumanization). His theory predicts that people who animalistically dehumanize others conceive of these others as lacking uniquely human traits but possessing human nature traits. However, in many examples of exterminationist dehumanization, such as the Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide, dehumanized victims are conceived of as creatures akin to insects, lice, or reptiles, but these creatures lack paradigmatic “human nature” traits of emotionality, warmth, openness, agency, individuality, and depth that Haslam’s theory states should be attributed to them.
Claims that to be human is to belong to a certain biological grouping, or to be rational, or to possess a soul, or to have certain psychological characteristics all take it for granted that humanness can be boiled down to one or more objective properties. It is the idea that there are certain facts about others that make it the case that they are human beings. Political scientist Anne Phillips calls such approaches “substantive.”17 They are substantive because they assume that there is some fact of the matter about whether any given being is a human being. Phillips argues that substantive approaches are unsatisfactory because they either leave some people out of the circle of the human or so are rarified that they are devoid of content. She proposes that humanity is never discovered in others. Instead, it is given or taken—granted, claimed, withdrawn, or withheld. “People,” she says, “assert, rather than prove, their claims to be regarded as human.”18 She holds that to accept another being as human is to grant them a certain status, and to refer to oneself as human is to stake a claim to that status. Philosopher Michael Hauskeller writes in a similar vein:
It shouldn’t matter how we classify, what we call human and what not, but to many people it obviously does. Why is that so? Why do we care whether we are human or not, or someone else is? And why do we care what makes us human, that is, why do we care for the reason we call ourselves human? I think the answer to the first question (and thus, as we will see, also to the second) is that ‘human’, to us, is usually more than just a descriptive predicate. It more often than not has a very strong prescriptive dimension. It is, just as the word ‘person’ according to St Thomas Aquinas, a nomen dignitatis, that is a title of honour, or a dignity-conferring name.19
Phillips and Hauskeller are on the right track. Interpreting humanness as an assigned status avoids the problems that plague efforts to equate humanness with objective properties such as “rationality.” But their story needs filling out more. We need to know more about what is involved in the act of claiming human status for oneself, and admitting or denying it to others.
We can start with self-reference. People generally take their own humanity, and the humanity of members of their immediate community, for granted. “I” and “we” are human, but “they” may not be human. As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss observed, “Humanity is confined to the borders of the tribe, the linguistic group, or even, in some instances, to the village, so that many so-called primitive peoples describe themselves as ‘the men’ (or sometimes—though hardly more discreetly—as ‘the good’, ‘the excellent’, ‘the well- achieved’), thus implying that the other tribes, groups or villages have no part in the human virtues or even in human nature.”20 Tribal names are often “not formal designations, but merely equivalents of the pronoun ‘we.’ ”21 Let us suppose as a point of departure that the concept of the human is roughly equivalent to the concept of “us.” If this is right, then “human” functions as what theorists of language call an indexical term. Indexical terms are expressions whose referents radically depend on the contexts in which they are used. The word “here” is an indexical term, because it names wherever the speaker is located when they say “here.” “Now” is another indexical term—one that names the time at which the word is uttered. There are many more.
Even though indexicals can name totally different things depending on the contexts of their use, there is also a sense in which their meaning remains constant from one context to the next. “Here” always means “the place where I am” no matter where that place may be. And some of them can be construed in more or less fine-grained or coarse-grained ways: if I say “I’m here” I might be talking about a particular spot in my house, or I might be referring to the particular town, state, or country where my house is located. The word “human” is similarly elastic. As Lévi-Strauss pointed out, it can designate “the tribe, the linguistic group, or even … the village,” and of course, at larger scales, it can designate the species, the genus, or some other extended biotaxonomic category.
The idea that “human” functions as an indexical term provides a good alternative to the predominant substantive accounts. But a problem remains that needs surmounting. The proposal that “human” just means “we” or “us” is not specific enough. Although when we use these words, we are normally referring to other human beings, it is usually some subset of the beings we think of as human beings that we are talking about. A person who phones a friend and says “We’ll arrive in half an hour” is not equating himself and his partner—the “we”—with the whole of humanity. So, if being human is being one of “us,” we need to look more carefully at the how these notions work. Recall the category “human” is supposed to be a natural kind. This suggests a refinement of the indexical theory of humanness. “Human” means “us” in the restricted sense of my (natural) kind. To think of other beings as human, then, is to regard them as members of the same natural kind as oneself, and as sharing the same essence as oneself.
This way of looking at the matter accommodates the fact that there are so many different substantive conceptions of what it means to be human. A person with a self-conception of being a member of a certain biological taxon—say, the genus Homo—will conceive of only and all members of that genus as a human. And a person who identifies primarily with the Aryan race (conceived of as an essentialized kind) will limit humanness to members of that group.22 The content of “human” is whatever the speaker or thinker takes their natural kind to be—whatever population of beings they take to share their essence.
There are three more points that need to be made about how attributions of humanness work before I conclude this chapter. First, regarding others as members of one’s own kind has a normative character—it elevates them (recall Hauskeller’s observation that “human” is a dignity-conferring name). This is because we think of natural kinds as being ranked on a hierarchy of value, and are disposed to value our own kind above the others. To accord others human status is therefore to give them a privileged status. The idea that humans are simply those that are the same kind of being as oneself, and therefore that all others are, by default, nonhuman or subhuman, should not be confused with the in-group / out-group biases that I discussed in Chapter 7. The indexical analysis does not restrict humanness to the in-group. In-groups are constituted by those whom we consider to be members of our social kind—and in some cases by individuals whom we believe to be members of our natural kind, such as racial groups. But the in-group / out-group boundary does not have to demarcate the category of the human from that of the subhuman. In fact, the in-group / out-group dichotomy generally presupposes that both groups share a common humanity. It would be very odd to think of a nonhuman animal (say, a rat) as an out-group member. Rats are not the kinds of things that can fit into the in-group / out-group framework. Likewise, binaries like “friend” and “enemy,” “ally” and “rival,” all presuppose a shared humanity. It is perfectly true that out-group members become dehumanized, but their dehumanization is neither constituted by, nor a necessary consequence of, their out-group status. Second, although I have described the dignity-conferring act in individualistic terms, the boundaries of the human are almost always collectively legislated and usually entrenched in shared social ideologies that are handed down from one generation to the next. So, instead of thinking of “human” as meaning “my basic natural kind,” it is more accurate to understand it as “our basic natural kind.” This shows us that “human” is almost always a politically significant status.23
If this analysis is correct, then the human / subhuman dichotomy is an ideological construction. So, to understand dehumanization we have to understand the nature of ideology—a topic to which I now turn.