Recently, Psychology Today published an article by clinical psychologist Gregg Henriques, who provides unexpected support for human exceptionalism. That’s the idea — considered self-evident in most human cultures — that we human beings are unusual among animals.
In recent years, fashionable thinkers have done their best to pretend otherwise. Some have engaged in arcane and often harmful experiments with great apes to try to prove otherwise. Their main achievement has not been with animals but rather with popular culture: They have made human exceptionalism (HE) an unfashionable fact to assert.
Nonetheless, Henriques, the author of A New Unified Theory of Psychology (Springer 2011), goes ahead and asserts it. He starts with a thought experiment:
Imagine you are driving down the street, and from the left side of the road, a dog runs out in front of you. You begin to swerve to avoid it when you see that on your right is a young girl. If you continue to swerve, you will hit her. But if you don’t keep swerving, you will run the dog over. What do you do?
As brutal as the choice is, the vast majority of people would say they would not swerve further, and the ultimate reason is that a human child has fundamentally more value than a dog.
“On Human Exceptionalism,” February 28, 2025
Why do we think so?
Henriques quotes Wesley J. Smith who has reprinted his column at Humanize:
On accepting HE hangs our ability to defend universal human rights and equality, maintain the morality of medicine, protect the dignity of the vulnerable and shield them from exploitation and instrumentalization, enable the material thriving of our species, and generate the optimism needed to fight against the strong Black Hole drag of nihilism that badly infects Western Civilization.…Many of the differences between humans and all other known life are moral in nature, not merely biological. Hence, hawks have exceptional eyesight, but that is merely biological, as is our bipedalism. On the other hand, we (as just one example), are—whether due to random evolution, creation, o[r] intelligent design—the only known moral agents. It is in our very natures to be so, and those of us who aren’t are either too immature for the moral natures to have fully expressed, or are injured or disabled in some capacity. That is a distinction with a moral difference.
“On Human Exceptionalism,” March 3, 2025
Henriques goes on to say that evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff has taken issue with this view at Psychology Today, holding that “HE is a narrow, self-serving view, a form of speciesism, which is akin to racism, sexism, and other forms of unfounded prejudice.” Specifically,
What we now know about animal minds (certainly among mammals but also among a wide variety of other species) does not support human exceptionalism and we need to factor this into how we treat other animals and Earth.
Bekoff, “Animal Minds and the Foible of Human Exceptionalism,” July 30, 2011
If facts matter, that is flatly and obviously untrue. Henriques responds,
Humans engage in a whole different class of behaviors. Humans are as different from other animals as animals are different from plants. Whether it is writing a blog, composing a sonnet, leading a revolution, attending a class, building a computer, and on and on, it is an empirical fact that human behavior exhibits a whole separate dimension of complexity. To deny this or to claim that this observation is only based on species wishful thinking lacks intellectual integrity. “On Human Exceptionalism”
Secular humanism rediscovers an old truth?
Henriques, a secular humanist, has developed an approach to psychology that accepts human exceptionalism without denying that animals have mental abilities:
The system I have developed for unifying psychology argues strongly that humans are a unique kind of animal. However, in contrast to many traditional positions that differentiate animals from humans …, the unified theory claims animals are mental and most are conscious … Humans are unique in that they have a self-consciousness system on top of the conscious system shared with other animals.“ On Human Exceptionalism”
And humans?
We are the justifying animal. And that opens up a whole new, qualitative dimension of existence. It is not that other animals don’t have minds. That is an obviously misguided claim. Instead, it is better to think of it in terms of humans having two minds, whereas other animals only have one. Thus, the answer to HE is not that humans are exceptional because they are conscious and feel—other animals are conscious and feel. But humans are exceptional in that they have the capacity for self-conscious justification, which in turn is the engine that builds human cultures and knowledge systems about truth, goodness, and evil. On Human Exceptionalism”
That sounds about right. But it isn’t new. It is roughly what Aristotle (384– 322 BC) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) would say!
As Michael Egnor and I note in our forthcoming book The Immortal Mind (Worthy June 3, 2025), the human mind does indeed consist of two parts: a mortal part that we share with animals and an immortal part that we share with spiritual beings. To the mortal part belong feelings, sensations, emotions, etc., that we share with animals. To the immortal part belong reason and moral choice, the qualities by which we write a new computer program or choose to tell the truth to our cost.
It’s good news when secular psychologists rediscover a core teaching of ancient wisdom. To raise just one point, if humans were not exceptional, how could we help animals in danger? Conservation programs and veterinary medicine, to name two enterprises that benefit animals, depend entirely on our exceptionality. Left to themselves, the animals would simply die or go extinct. We can’t change our exceptionality and we ignore it at our peril – and theirs.
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