Yes, Human Beings Are Exceptional

It’s trendy to talk down our species. But right now, our exceptionalism is the planet’s greatest ally.

Cave paintings in Argentina dating from 13,000 to 9,000 years ago—evidence of the jump to universality. (Photo by R.M. Nunes via Getty.)

Let me tell you the tale of the ungrateful creatures who crawled out of Eden.

They murdered their own mothers. They slaughtered their own siblings. And they reproduced with such wild abandon that their success drove nearly all other life on Earth extinct.

I’m talking, of course, about certain nematode worms, sand tiger sharks, and cyanobacteria, respectively.¹

“Wait a minute,” you say, “I thought this was about us!”

I’m not surprised. Such stories now dominate the zeitgeist, painting our species as a unique blight in an otherwise perfect paradise, Mother Nature’s one bad seed. The Guardian, The Harvard Gazette, and The Institute of Art and Ideas have all recently published pieces blaming the ongoing ecological crisis on human exceptionalism—the belief that humanity is superior to other life forms in an ethically meaningful way. Christine Webb’s book, The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why it Matters, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2025. And as I write, viewers are still flocking to theaters to watch the third installment in James Cameron’s Avatar—a series about a large corporation’s attempts to exploit the natural resources of a distant moon, likely representing humanity’s most expensive critique of its own superiority complex.

This bleak outlook may be gaining steam, but it couldn’t be more wrong. Humans are indeed exceptional, and embracing that fact is not the cause of, but is rather the solution to, the ongoing ecological crisis.

In evaluating the bleak narrative, it’s worth distinguishing between two claims: first, that other creatures are capable of suffering and deserve our empathy; and second, that human exceptionalism is a moral failure that’s driving the destruction of the planet.

The first claim is unobjectionable. We don’t know where on the tree of life consciousness first flowered, so some questions are currently unanswerable. (Does a cockroach suffer when it’s squished underfoot? Does a bacterium upon first contact with penicillin?) But we should all be able to agree that many organisms—other mammals, for example—definitely seem to experience both joy and pain, to feel both love and fear. And we also know that mammalian brains include many of the same structures that power our own emotional processing. Absent a compelling explanation for why consciousness requires the specific features these animals lack, denying their subjectivity is irrational.

If other creatures are conscious—if they subjectively experience the world and are capable of suffering—then they deserve our empathy. On this point, critics of our behavior are absolutely right: the ongoing destruction of the environment and practices like factory farming, which inflict extreme suffering upon billions of animals a year, are indeed moral atrocities.

But recognizing this does not require us to deny humanity’s exceptional nature. On the contrary, appreciating our unique place in the cosmos is a prerequisite to building a better world, not only for us and our descendants, but for all of Mother Nature’s other children as well.

The more passionate critics of “speciesism” (the prioritization of humanity’s needs over all others) often make their case by way of an analogy to racism. But racism isn’t evil because it posits a difference in the moral worth of two groups. It’s evil because it wrongly posits such a difference. Racists mistakenly assume superficial differences—such as skin color or eye shape—should impact moral value. The central question for us, then, is whether the qualities that make us human are essential to determining moral value.

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Bringing Human Nature Back In

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The anti-exceptionalists are clear where they stand. “Any idea that humans are better or at the top or superior in any way is just wrong,” they say. The mind of a human is comparable to the bioluminescence of a lantern fish or the music of a songbird, they say: each adaptation unique in its own way, but none more ethically meaningful than the others. And failing to recognize this is the cause of the ecological crisis, they say.

I say they’re wrong. Humanity is exceptional.

Our needs and wants matter more—not because we’re more powerful, but because our capacity to suffer and flourish exceeds that of any other creature on Earth. Philosophers of mind can’t even agree on whether certain configurations of matter produce conscious minds, or whether conscious minds conjure our physical world. But they do generally agree that there exists some important relationship between the two. A person experiences a broader range of emotions than any other creature, and is much more capable of breathing meaning into the cosmos.

This is why none of us feels any particular guilt about our immune system’s unending war against the microbes that invade our bodies every day and night. It’s why letting a human child suffer to spare a pet would be morally wrong. And it’s why equating speciesism with racism is ludicrous: it equates the superficial difference between a Caucasian and a racial minority with the essential difference between people and other species.

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The more profound justification for human exceptionalism—and the reason its denial is so dangerous—is that our unique capacity for rational knowledge creation can make us an unparalleled force for good. Species egalitarians often dispute this by citing Charles Darwin himself, who famously said, “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.” But on this point, the legendary scientist was wrong: sometimes a sufficient difference in degree can produce a difference in kind.

In his 2012 book The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch, the father of quantum computing, shows how gradual improvements can sometimes evolve a system past a certain critical threshold after which it becomes infinitely more potent—a process he describes as a jump to universality. An example is the difference between a pictographic writing system, in which each character represents a word, and an alphabet, in which each character represents a sound. The former can be used to write only a finite set of words, but the latter is universal: it can be used to write any word that could ever be imagined using the sounds of that language.

The human brain, Deutsch argues, represents a similar jump to universality. Though it evolved gradually, at some point it cleared that critical threshold, transforming into a qualitatively different thing: a physical structure with a computational repertoire on par with a universal Turing machine. This means a healthy human brain—armed with the right memory and speed augmenting devices, like a pencil or a computer—is capable of representing almost any idea that is logically possible and of understanding fundamental truths about the physical world. Equating this to a lantern fish’s ability to glow in the dark is absurd.

We, alone among Mother Nature’s creations, can iteratively improve our collective understanding of reality by subjecting our conjectures to rational criticism. And, importantly, this can produce not just scientific knowledge, but moral knowledge as well. Our capacity for moral reasoning is why Martin Luther King, Jr. had that dream. It’s why Rosa Parks took that seat and why Malala Yousafzai took that stand. And it’s why their actions can change the minds of millions as they reverberate through time.

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It’s easy to look at what we’ve done to the planet and say “the world would be better off without us.” But this view is too shortsighted. Though we are responsible for the current ecological crisis, the climate change deniers are right about one thing: the planet’s climate has changed many times in the past, and it will change many times in the future, whether or not humans are around to see it. There is only one force in the universe potent enough to preserve the biosphere in the face of these cataclysms: our ability to create and use knowledge.

To deliver change at the scale we require, we need to better align the interests of individual people with the environment. It’s not enough to recognize that factory farming is cruel or that burning fossil fuels harms the biosphere. Expecting the billions of people who struggle to make ends meet to prioritize the environment over their own immediate needs is unrealistic. Telling them their suffering is on par with a frog’s is insulting. We need new knowledge that will enable us to meet the needs of all of humanity, without sacrificing the environment in the process.

This knowledge may take the form of new technology, such as lab-grown meats, nuclear fusion, or carbon sequestration. Or it may take the form of new international treaties, new legislation, or even entirely new modes of organizing economic and political activity. But one thing is certain: that knowledge will only be discovered by the people who search for it.

This is why the denial of human exceptionalism is so dangerous. It’s a fundamentally disempowering perspective that rejects our only viable path forward. The ecological crisis is the result of us treating the planet as nothing more than a resource to exploit—in other words, behaving like every other creature on Earth. The solution is not to accept our animal nature, but to reject it and rise above.

The hottest place in the solar system is not the surface of the Sun but the inside of our experimental fusion reactors. The coldest place in the universe is not found in the deep space between stars, but within the confines of our own absolute zero experiments. These things, as well as our greatest moral victories—from the abolition of slavery to the emancipation of women—were made possible only by unleashing our unique capacity for knowledge creation. If we want to stop the damage we’re doing to the planet and reverse the damage we’ve done; if we want to become the protectors the biosphere so badly needs; and if we want to carry the torch to ensure the light of consciousness burns brightly for billions of years to come; we must continue to embrace what sets us apart.

Bharath Krishnamoorthy is a Columbia Law graduate and the founder and former CEO of Denim.

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1. The flatworm Mesorhabditis belari hatches inside its mother’s body then eats its way out. The sand tiger shark embryo that matures first will eat its siblings inside the uterus. And cyanobacteria flooded the atmosphere with oxygen 2.4 billion years ago, causing somewhere between 70-99% of species on Earth to go extinct.