The Difference Between Us
What phenomenology reveals about animals, ethics, and ourselves
The conversation about nonhuman animals often begins with guilt and ends with despondency. I’m hearing a concern about factory farming in surprising corners. In the last year, Sam Harris did a couple of episodes for his podcast on Effective Altruism. The first was done late in 2025; it was a conversation with David Edmonds, about his latest book. The second of these, in March, was an in-depth conversation with animal ethicist William MacAskill. As one of the founders with Peter Singer of Effective Altruism, MacAskill is passionate about educating people on atrocities against animals, but Sam, with his demeanor in that episode, left something to be wondered at. Then, 34 minutes into “More from Sam #482,” he takes a question about animal intelligence and familiarity. The listener asks why anyone might feel it’s ok to factory farm pigs but not dogs, given the comparability of intelligence between pigs and dogs? In his long answer, Sam begins with an absolute statement: “Factory farming anything is awful.” This was the first time I’ve ever heard him take a firm, unmistakable ethical stance on animal ethics. Even in the MacAskill episode, I did not hear anything like resolution in his discourse.
He agrees that factory farming is awful, no matter which animal we’re talking about or its level of intelligence. He elaborated with comparisons: we would never, he said, condone the factory farming of chimpanzees—not just because of their intelligence but because of their similarity to us.
Intelligence and similarity are frequently the channels through which animal welfare activists work to appeal to the broader public. It is rarer to find someone who makes the case that respect and ethics are duties owed to all living creatures, animals and plants, regardless of difference or cognitive abilities.
Étienne Bimbenet is a philosopher in France who makes this case in his books and lectures. Compassion for animals is essential, he argues, but so is understanding them on their own terms—and understanding ourselves on ours. Respect does not require erasing the difference between humans and animals, but it does require finally seeing and respecting that difference without exception.
Advocates for animal wellbeing generally lock onto themes of likeness in order to attract support. They have to tug at the heartstrings and nothing tugs at the human heartstrings like relatability. Bimbenet challenges us to add difference to our reasons to feel compassion.
His article in Environmental Philosophy, “The Fallacy of Human Animality,” attempts to give animal ethics and those who care about it solid ground that can’t be shaken by ideological debates about intelligence, language, cognition, or consciousness.
Cruelty is never justified. Underscoring Bimbenet’s thesis is the elevation of morality over moralism. Morality does not depend on anthropological similarity. It extends respect regardless of difference.
I’ve been reading and re-reading this article which he wrote slightly more than a decade ago.1 It is structured in two parts: first, outlining three fallacies or distortions, and second, naming three specific differences. He starts with life science—what it has taught us about biology, what we learned from Darwin about evolution. He notes how easy it is to see ourselves mirrored in the animal kingdom, particularly with chimpanzees, and to relate to animals broadly through sensitivity to joy and suffering.
Reductionism makes it impossible to see that which is obvious. It is a biased discourse, promoting ignorance rather than true reflection.
Etienne Bimbenet
The three fallacies:
That we know everything epistemologically about anthropological difference and ignore or conflate specific differences
Moralism and what G.E. Moore calls the “naturalistic fallacy”2 (i.e. equating “A is” and “A must”)
Metaphysical/religious dogma about rational thought & creationism
René Descartes (1596-1650) insisted that animals don’t feel pain. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) corrected the historical record against that insanity. And yet, for all that Bentham understood the sentience of nonhuman animals,3 we still have not settled the questions on how we treat or should treat, regard, and talk about animals. We are all familiar with the arguments about intelligence and similarity; this is the first place people go in discourse, as we saw in the Sam Harris episode. We also know that exploitation and abuse of animals was historically justified by denying sensitivity, similarity, and/or intelligence. We protect cats and dogs with a special consideration because of the unique bond and kinship we share with them and a similar line gets drawn for monkeys on account of the similarity and the high level of intelligence in that species. And yet “discontinuity seems naturally guilty,”4 Bimbenet writes.
I had to read that passage several times before it clicked.
Bimbenet tackles the three fallacies in terms of continuity. Starting with metaphysics, he notes that “continuous” doesn’t have to mean never-changing. The metaphysical concept of duality of human nature (body and spirit) can coexist with evolution. He doesn’t allow a necessary contradiction between Darwinism and Creationism, asserting that the variance of structure or function (such as bipedalism, although he doesn’t isolate a specific characteristic here) does not erase origin or negate continuity. He further cites the philosopher Georges Canguilem, whose work focused on normalities, and to understand this, I thought of drawing a line: I can draw a line continuously, and give it waves, and still keep going with the pen on the paper. The line I’ve drawn is a line, indeed, with a clear starting point. We might say that the troughs represent marks of human difference in the history of life. Bimbenet cites Merleau-Ponty’s “structure of behavior”5 concept, not to reject a metaphysical explanation outright, but rather to suggest an integration into something new. Something becomes. Here, perhaps, is McDowell’s “naturalism of a second nature.”6
He pushes back lightly against long-running metaphysical and religious assertions about animals and rational thought. He doesn’t have to push too hard. Philosophical anthropology and related fields like ethology have made it increasingly difficult to maintain old assumptions about animals as purely mechanical or irrational creatures. Frans de Waal’s work in studying the politics of chimpanzees showed them acting very much like humans do in politics, even Machiavellian in behavior.7 But Bimbenet cautions us about reducing chimpanzees to caricatures8 This is reductionism, he says, citing De Waal’s work about Chimpanzees and power politics.9
Reductionism easily becomes bigotry with such phrases as “acting like monkeys” or “monkey business.” Bimbenet doesn’t use those phrases, but the implication is clear. What starts as a flattering nod to intelligence in fact quickly becomes derogatory.
Knowing that animals live a different life than ours should not prevent us from respecting them.
Étienne Bimbenet
He goes on to say it is their sensitivity that makes it a duty to show them respect. That is to say, they are living and breathing and feeling, that they are, indeed, sentient beings. It is our moral and ethical duty to respect another who feels, regardless of culture or nationality or any other difference. It is true, as Bimbenet points out, that the “closer” a person is in terms of connection and how they relate to us, the more sensitive we are to their joy and pain. That is to say, we deeply feel another’s suffering and joy “by concentric degrees of proximity and resemblance.”10
The 20th century philosopher Jacques Derrida also put a lot of thought into our relationship with nonhuman animals. Bimbenet cites what might be Derrida’s most famous book—L’Animal que je donc je suis (Galilée, 2006)—in English, The Animal That Therefore I Am. He mentions the moment that Derrida contemplates his cat in the bathroom, where he thinks about nakedness and begins to feel shame. Not of his nakedness per se, but of his part in the human race that, for centuries, thought of itself alone in nakedness. Derrida’s contemplation of the shared experience between human and feline touches on something real and intuitive. We naturally feel that cats and dogs are “like us” in so many ways. Not just biologically but also in the psychological need for companionship, affection, and playfulness.
Animal life, like human life, refers to behaviors that we cannot know anything about if we keep outside, and if we do not bother to consider them for their intrinsic meaning.
Étienne Bimbenet
He walks us through three lines of facts—”distinct yet convergent” specific differences that help us to “see”:
Depth of human language and complexity of perspective
Ways of sharing experience & wonder about discovery for its own sake
Sense of realism/social construction
Bimbenet considers human language and “perspectival multiplicity”11 as a specific difference. Dogs, cats, and chimpanzees are extremely curious and playful creatures, but their interest is sparked by things in the horizon of their perception. When we look at animals and the natural world, we see wonders—through pictures, cinema, art, and literature. Thus, what distinguishes humans, for Bimbenet, is not perception itself but the ability to transform perception into something shareable.
A solitary perception is not a perception. It is a dream.
Étienne Bimbenet
Whatever I see, someone else can see too. In today’s language, we might call it open source. Or, to use Bimbenet’s comic allusion, it’s communism.12 He talks about joint attention and pointing at objects in order to draw the attention of another onto something that has captured our curiosity. Chimpanzees also use pointing as a way to draw another’s attention onto objects of interest, but the specific difference here is the isolated desire to share the discovery. At a very young age, the human develops this desire to share how it sees the world. Not just for acquisition. Not merely to chase, hunt, use—although, obviously, we do all of that. But just to look, to contemplate, to comment, to exchange opinions in a forum of other humans?
Bimbenet writes:
“Joint attention, as the language that sustains its effectiveness, achieves in the realm of life behaviors a form of ‘Copernican Revolution’: it places us permanently in the dimension of ‘reference,’ as opposed to a life pragmatically focused on what is good for oneself or the group.”13
Nonhuman animals are capable of learning the pointing gesture even if it does require a lot of “trial and errors,”14 but in general, for them, it is learned as a “proto-imperative”15 gesture which is not the same as the “proto-declarative”16 nonverbal expression that humans use amongst each other.17
“We can thus group under the term ‘joint attention’ a set of facts found in a dispersed and relatively incomplete state in animals,” writes Bimbenet, “and in a coherent and systematic form in humans.”18
Realism is the final point Bimbenet makes before his conclusion. He writes that realism is the world that the human perceives, learns, believes in, judges and acts within. In short, it is “what [phenomenology’s father Edmund] Husserl rightly called the ‘natural attitude.’”19 There’s nothing miraculous about it. We simply learn over the course of our lives how perceived reality is organized, how to navigate inside it, and how to make sense of all its structures and supposed meanings. We start out, he says, in “egocentric logic,”20 and then as we grow up and go to school and work, we assimilate into the real world. Realism is, above all, our attitude in the world. It’s how we relate and refer to it. He writes:
“It describes only intentional actions. In its various behaviors, the human claims that there is a world, it believes that the world exists, and assumes that there is a unique natural world; all these subjective views manage to configure a unique and original form of life. That is all that phenomenology can say.”21
We tell true or false stories, we comment on past or present facts, we let others know what they did not know, we bring noteworthy events to the neighbor’s attention, we take a stand in discussions, we allege a scientific fact, and so on. Even a lie (from simple exaggeration to deliberate deception) is a mode of reference or statement, given that to reach his ends, the liar has to pretend, and therefore presuppose the institution of truth-telling. It is the whole fabric of our lives that relates intentionally to the reality of the world.
Étienne Bimbenet
He finishes by noting very importantly that, objectively speaking, there is nothing unique about being human. The difference is in how we live, not necessarily how we are. It’s in how we live subjectively in the common world that desubjectivizes22 us, continually refocusing our perspectives toward external reference points.
But don’t stop there. Don’t close your eyes. Bimbenet does reach a sensible, reasonable conclusion in his essay, but he doesn’t pretend to be the final word. He knows that it would be absurd, not to mention anthropocentric to presume that he has answered the riddle once and for all.
Works consulted
Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Wikisource contributors, "An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation," Wikisource, https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=An_Introduction_to_the_Principles_of_Morals_and_Legislation&oldid=15923136 (accessed July 25, 2026).
Bimbenet, Étienne. “The Fallacy of Human Animality.” Environmental Philosophy 11, no. 1 (2014): 27–44. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26169789. Translated from French to English by Dr. Ramon Fonkoué.
Canguilem, Georges. The Normal and the Pathological, translated by Carolyn R. Fawcett & Robert S. Cohen. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
De Waal, Frans. Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes. London: Jonathan Cape, 1982. 307–36. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0305000900008813.
Franco, Fabia, and George Butterworth. 1996. “Pointing and Social Awareness:
Declaring and Requesting in the Second Year.” Journal of Child Language 23:
307–36. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0305000900008813
Husserl, Edmund. 1973. Experience and Judgment. Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, edited by Ludwig Landgrebe. Translated by James Spencer Churchill and Karl Ameriks. Introduction by J. S. Churchill. Afterward by L. Eley. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
McDowell, John. Mind and World. Harvard University Press, 1996. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvjghtzj.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge, 2012. A translation from the French original from Paris:Gallimard, 1945.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Structure of Behavior. Translated by Alden Fisher. Boston: Beacon Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Moore, Chris, and Philip Dunham. 1995. Joint Attention. Its Origins and Role in Development. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Moore, G.E., 1993. Wikipedia contributors, “Principia Ethica,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Principia_Ethica&oldid=1362155794 (accessed July 27, 2026).
Roessler, Johannes. 2005. “Joint Attention and the Problem of Other Minds.” In Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds. Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, edited by Naomi Eilan, Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack, and Johannes Roessler. Oxford: Clarendon Press. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245635.003.0011.
Werner, Heinz, & Kaplan, Bernard. Symbol formation: An organismic developmental approach to language and the expression of thought. NY: John Wiley, 1963.
Wikipedia contributors, “Étienne Bimbenet,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%C3%89tienne_Bimbenet&oldid=1365345816 (accessed July 25, 2026).
Works cited
As a writer, Etienne Bimbenet has won awards for two books, both about this topic: L’Animal que je ne suis plus (Gallimard, 2011, winner of the Prix Dagnan-Bouveret from France’s Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 2012) and Le Complexe des trois singes. Essai sur l’animalité humaine (Le Seuil, 2017, winner of the essay prize from Monaco’s Rencontres Philosophiques in 2018.)
Bimbenet, p.31. Citing G.E. Moore, 1903.
Bentham. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907. Cited in Bimbenet, p.31.
Bimbenet, p.28.
Bimbenet. p.33
ibid.
Bimbenet, p.28.
Bimbenet, p.28.
De Waal. Cited in Bimbenet, p.29-30.
Of course, this is intuitive. Page 32 is where Bimbenet discusses proximity and resemblance and how their increase is proportional to our sensitivity. He points out what Sam Harris also mentions: that we are more sensitive to abuse against pigs and dogs than to, say, the scalding of a lobster in boiling water.
Bimbenet, p.37
Bimbenet, p.36.
Bimbenet, p.38, citing Werner & Kaplan, 1963.
Bimbenet, p.38, citing Franco and Butterworth, 1996 & also Tomasello and Call, 1996
ibid.
ibid.
In the course of reading this article on JSTOR, in the same issue, which deals in depth with this concept:
Urban, Petr. “Joint Attention and Anthropological Difference.” Environmental Philosophy 11, no. 1 (2014): 59–70. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26169791.
Bimbenet, p.37, citing Moore and Dunham, 1995 & Roessler, 2005.
Bimbenet, p.38.
Bimbenet, p.39.
Bimbenet, p.40.
His article as an in-person presentation: https://youtu.be/qXLXOW-YUlI?si=rhois7OwyzPvKE_z