Oh, The Humanity!

A question that has been weighing heavily on my mind of late is that of what makes a human... well... human. You could try to list physical traits, like "bipedal, mammalian, oxygen breathing, carbon based life forms possessing the abilities to give birth to live young, form complex thought and make difficult ethical decisions regarding other human beings." Or you could go with a dictionary definition: "any individual of the genus Homo, especially a member of the species Homo sapiens." Now, both of these seem to be pretty concrete; however, the problem is that they will always have grey areas. No matter what you do, there will always be some sort of gap between what is human, and what is not. Perhaps the gap is too small to see, too small to exploit. Still, this gap is inevitable with any objective approach to the problem.

To prove a point, lets take the first definition. I could pose the counter argument of there being an alien life form possessing all of those qualities. Ok, then what if we add another trait to the list? Same thing. Anticipating my strategy, one could then go to add "belonging to an Earth-originating species." Ah, but what of people, say, from different dimensions? They don't come from our Earth, so are they not human? Balderdash... ect. Can you see how this would go on?

And so we must ask, what makes the people we know to be human, human? Why am I human? Why is the last person I talked to human? Why is my mother human? And above all, why is a dog/cat/anything else NOT human? What separates them so succinctly? What puts one thing into one category and another into the other? What allows us to solve this inherently subjective problem?

Wait, subjective? Yes, that's it! Since the problem is inherently subjective, then the answer should be subjective as well. What makes someone human is that is how you perceive them.

Allow that to sink in. Now, realize that is basically it. Someone is human because that is how you think of them. A dog is not human because you are not perceiving it as human, you are perceiving it as a dog. The reason we can get confused and caught up in objective details is because due to the sheer number and connectedness of humans today there is bound to be major overlap. The idea that someone human because "that is how you perceive them" as the solution to the equation allows for those little places where not everyone agrees. It works in every case because everyone is deciding from their respective viewpoint; hence, the answer fits all cases for all people. If there is indecision, then you simply do not have enough information on the subject to decide. I'm sure we will strive for a more... concrete definition, and perhaps some day we will come to it. Until then, though, this is why we still have juries.