Subhuman analyzes human attitudes toward animals, arguing that those attitudes are determined by our moral valuations of them, which according to Kasperbauer largely arise from their role as a contrast class to human beings.  The clearest example of the use of animals as a contrast class shows up in dehumanization studies literature. During some of the world’s most shocking human tragedies, human groups have been compared to animals that trigger general feelings of disgust (rats, cockroaches, vermin, apes) in order to justify cruel treatment or murder of another group. The Nazis compared Jews to rats, for example, just as Black Americans are sometimes compared to apes.

Kasperbauer proposes as central to our comparative relationship with animals the negative judgment that animals are members of an outgroup, which he argues elicits a categorical response of avoidance. The strength of the avoidance impulse will be determined by a number of factors, but all animals, argues Kasperbauer, elicit this response to some degree, because it represents an adaptation to evolutionary pressures. Animals, representing both predators and prey, cannot help but elicit antagonistic responses from human beings, the author reasons. However, the threat of animals goes beyond that of physical harm to present humans with a psychological threat as well. Even animals for which humans may show significant care, such as dogs and cats, pose humans psychological threat, reasons Kasperbauer, by sharing human spaces and thereby violating the human/animal boundary. Kasperbauer goes further to argue that our positive attachments for these domesticated animals is actually a deep-seated psychological response to the need to cope with our discomfort of offending the human/animal boundary.

Compassion (the capacity to relate to another human being’s suffering), which philosophers have argued to be the quintessential human quality, represents such a strong force in any healthy human mind that cruelty and murder are rendered unthinkable without undermining that common creature feeling.  This explains why demeaning comparisons, which identify outgroups with animals unworthy of dignity and respect, are a standard aspect of preparing soldiers for war. Dehumanization is the first front in the effort to disconnect the usual common creature sympathies that would otherwise make interspecies killing impossible. It is easy to see why certain animals (rats, vermin) are selected as useful tools in the dehumanization process. What is less clear is the larger claim of Subhuman that animals serve a contrast function that always permits humans to come out on top.

Kasperbauer argues that humans are driven by our “relatively low rank” on the scale of nature, what philosophers name the Great Chain of Being, to demean animals in order to lift ourselves up. This claim seems disingenuous,  however,  given that humans stand just below the gods and other heavenly beings on this scale. Nonetheless, this “low ranking” is the grounding for Kasperbauer’s claim that humans are universally and fundamentally motivated to compare themselves hierarchically to animals, a motivation grounded in the desire to establish our superiority over something on the chain of natural beings. This permits Kasperbauer to then trace the moral psychology that arises out of human’s comparative relationship with animals to demonstrate that our frequently denigrating moral evaluations of animals serve important psychological functions for human beings.

However, it is not at all clear to the reader that this grounding principle upon which rests the ensuing analysis is in fact accurate. For many people, human beings compare unfavorably to animals. Ethologists, such as Konrad Lorenz, have shown that while animals kill for food and fight for territory and mating privileges, only humans freely practice interspecies aggression for no adaptive reason whatsoever.  Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov offers a clear expression of the counter-position to Kasperbauer, when Ivan Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s philosophical alter ego, speaking with his monk-brother Alyosha, states that animal/human comparisons are generally unfair to the animals: Ivan’s catalogue of cruelty to children by adults and often parents is offered as evidence that if a human being is superior to animals, their superiority rests only in their greater capacity to be “so artfully, so artistically cruel.”

Subhuman will provide a fascinating read for any educated reader, and especially for students of philosophy and psychology, even if you do not agree with come of the book’s founding claims. I recommend it highly for anyone interested in a satisfying foray into human/animal relations.

© 2018 Wendy C. Hamblet

Wendy C. Hamblet, Ph.D. (Philosophy), North Carolina A&T State University.