Roger Scruton argues in “If We Are Not Just Animals, What Are We?” (New York Times, March 6, 2017) that while human beings are certainly animals, we are actually more than animals in that “[w]e human beings do not see one another as animals see one another, as fellow members of a species. We relate to one another not as objects, but as subjects.” 

That, according to Scruton, only human beings are able to see one another as subjects rather than simply objects, is the foundation of moral obligation, and it is this, hear argues, that makes us inherently superior to other animals. 

But if, in fact, animals are incapable of conceptual thought, then animals cannot possibly relate to one another as members of a species, because that would require that they had some kind of concept of what a species was, which, it seems safe to say, they could not. I don’t mean to disparage animal intelligence. My point is that it took human beings millennia of contemplation of the “zoosphere” and their place in it, to come up with the concept of species, whereas we have no evidence that other animals have historically engaged in such contemplation. 

In fact, one is more or less compelled to conclude that animals have no choice but to relate to one another as individual subjects, subjects with whom they feel a more or less immediate sympathy or antipathy. This can be seen, I would argue, in the countless examples of animal cooperation and friendships across species, as well as in cases of animals adopting (and nursing) infants of species other than their own. That is, what they see, presumably, is a helpless individual whom they are in a position to help. Not every animal mother chooses to help such helpless infants, but this only reinforces the point that animals are not only individuals, but appear to view one another as individuals rather than as members of their own, or other, species. 

If animals are incapable of conceptual thought, then it appears Scruton has our situation relative to animals the wrong way round. Only human beings would be able to reduce others to objects in the sense Scruton asserts animals do. Only human beings would be able to make generalizations based on the concept of species because only human beings could have such a concept. And, indeed, we’ve objectified countless numbers of human beings simply by deciding they didn’t count as “human beings,” but as creatures of some lower order. 

Animals, on the other hand, if, in fact, they are incapable of conceptual thought, can’t do that. They’re compelled to related to other animals as individuals, in precisely the “‘I’ to ‘you’” sense Scruton points out Martin Buber “made central to the human condition” (emphasis added). In that sense, animals actually appear to be ahead of us morally, if not intellectually. Not only do they consistently relate to others as individuals, they don’t cloak their likes and dislikes of specific others with the mantel of objective science because, well, they can’t. 

It’s not my purpose here to defend the view that animals are incapable of conceptual thought, but only to point out a problem with Scruton’s position. The view that animals are incapable of conceptual thought is common among philosophers and likely the view that Scruton had when he wrote the piece in question in that he clearly assumes the vast superiority of human relative to animal intelligence is not a matter of degree, but of kind. 

But if that’s the case, then Scruton’s argument that only human beings can relate to one another as subjects rather than objects is incoherent.