Debater

As an example, sexual aggression in apes allows them to reproduce more. If humans did this, it would be rape and we would consider it repulsive. https://news.asu.edu/content/aggression-male-chimpanzees-leads-mating-success But if humans were animals, we would find nothing repulsive about rape, if it aided survival and reproduction. The fact that we do find it repulsive proves that humans have moral sentiments that animals don't, and that we value things which go above and beyond survival and reproduction (as per Maslow's hierarchy of needs), while animals presumably only understand survival. This allows us to object to wrongs such as rape, racism, and slavery, even if they could theoretically serve a survival utility. Beyond that, the things which make a person a person go above and beyond the mere biological traits they have in common with animals. Individual people have emotions, life experiences, thoughts, and other things that make them who they are. Classifying humans as animals, therefore, may be outdated. The biological traits shared with animals may exist, but the categorization is arbitrary, and we may be better off putting humans in a completely distinct category altogether, which acknowledges things which humans possess that animals don't (similarily to how we can categorize all cars as "cars" based on their similarities, but we can also categorize certain cars as "supercars" if they have significantly higher horsepower than other cars), such as moral sentiments that allow us to decide that rape is wrong because it violates the victim's ability to consent; even if it could serve the evolutionary imperative to reproduce, we, unlike animals, would value our moral sentiments more than we would survival.