Justin E. H. Smith

An Upcoming Talk

Race as Innate Schema and as Historical Kind: The Pre-Adamite Controversy in Context

[Forthcoming in in Marcelo Dascal, Adelino Cattani, and Victor Boantza (Eds.), Controversies within the Scientific Revolution (John Benjamins Publishing, 2010).

Justin E. H. Smith

Abstract. Recent research at the boundary of cognitive science, anthropology, and philosophy in the field of ‘folk taxonomy’ or ‘folk biology’ has drawn remarkable conclusions about the regularity of certain aspects of classification across cultures.  Atran 1990 has argued that in the highly structured and articulated domain of folk-taxonomical knowledge, there are universal constraints upon the different ways different cultures may carve the world up, and that Aristotle, and later Linnaeus, were no more free of these constraints than were the Guatemalan Indians whose taxonomic system Atran himself studied. Francisco Gil-White 2001 has extended this programme of research from cognition of animal and plant kinds to subkinds of the human species, that is, to what are generally called 'races'. Gil-White's argument is that not only is there an a priori structure for cognizing and classifying biological species, but human cultural groups are also, in turn, constrained to think of other human cultural groups on the model of biological species: that is, the same innate tendency toward essentialism about animal kinds is what makes human beings, everywhere and for the most part, racists. But there are some points of disanalogy that threaten Gil-White's thesis, the most important being that species are biologically significant categories (even if evolutionary theory has taken them down a few notches from their earlier status as eternal natural kinds on a par with gold or even triangles), whereas races are not. Part of Atran's thesis had been that, while rough, folk-biological taxonomy generally maps reliably onto the divisions in nature, whereas there simply are no corresponding divisions in nature that might enable "folk racial science" to "get it right."

Where then do racial categories come from, if not an a priori fit between the mind and the natural world? Here, it is helpful to introduce Hacking's notion of 'historical kind', and to consider in terms of it the relatively recent emergence of 'race' as a distinctively scientific category. What we see when we do this is that, while some variety of us/them dichotimization may be an ineliminable feature of human cognition of social reality, it was by no means inevitable that this feature should develop into a quasi-biological classificatory scheme. Some authors, such as Blaut 1993 and Hobson 2004 distinguish between implicit and explicit racism, the first of which "locates 'difference' through cultural, institutional and environmental criteria rather than genetic properties" (Hobson 2004, 220), while the latter, a 19th century invention, seeks to root racial difference in the available biological science of the era. On this definition, it stands to reason that there could not be explicit racism much before the late 18th century, since, after all, there was as yet no science of biology.

What both the cognitivist account as well as the theory of 'implicit racism' miss, however, is that there are significant ways in which one and the same theory of the other can serve vastly different purposes in different historical contexts. Perhaps no chapter in the history of thinking about human diversity illustrates this point better than the transformations in the theory of polygenesis from the mid-17th to the mid-19th centuries, which I propose to study in detail in this chapter. The most prominent early modern defender of polygenesis was Isaac La Peyrère, a French theologian and the author of the scandalous 1655 work, Prae-Adamitae. According to the Pre-Adamite thesis, there is a scriptural basis for the view that there were 'men before Adam'. Properly understood, scripture provides a way of accounting for the presence of human beings at the far corners of the globe, with no knowledge of the revealed truth of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and with physiognomies that could, with the limited and distorted information available, be thought to be different enough from those of Europeans to justify the claim of separate creations.

Now in context Pre-Adamism served to call into question the legitimacy of the missionary enterprise, which, however ethnocentric, was nonetheless based on a presumption of a universal human nature: these people warrant conversion because they are, at bottom, like us. While based in scripture, it undermined one of the central projects of the institutions that derived their authority from scripture. Its temperament was skeptical: given the available information about ancient history and prehistoric migrations of peoples, there was very good reason to think that the inhabitants of different continents and far-flung islands had to come into being separately from those people thought to be descended from Adam and Eve. In an earlier work, for example, the 1644 Relation de l'Islande, La Peyrère criticizes the view that the Icelanders, along with their revered 'prince' Odin, are descended from an errant faction of the ancient Roman army as follows: "[W]hat is the hope of being able to accept all of the fables that they tell about this Asiatic Odin, and what connection could such weak fables have with the age of Pompeius, which is an age so well known, and so historical?" (XXXV). For La Peyrère, the principle of parsimony spoke against the project of rooting all newly discovered peoples in the available historical tradition, but in the end it was just this that monogenetic accounts of human origins had to do in order to account for the ancestral link of, say, the Native Americans to the first parents in the Garden of Eden.

One of the implicit messages of early modern polygenesis might be summed up as: "let us leave them alone, for they are not like us." This went directly against the missionary outlook, which might in turn be summed up as: "let us interfere in their world, for they are like us." In this respect, early polygenesis anticipates the Herderian defense of irreducible cultural specificity, against the prevailing spirit of Enlightenment universalism. Yet by the 19th century, polygenesis theory would be remolded to support a very different sort of hortation: "let us dominate them, for they are not like us." In this period, it would come to serve as one of the principle arguments, especially in the United States, in defense of the now threatened institution of slavery. This remarkable malleability of the purposes to which the theory of polygenesis can be put strongly suggests that a cognitivist account of the innate basis of racial classification cannot tell us much of anything about racism as a factor in the social and political sphere. It also suggests that if we want to understand the history of racism, we would do well to turn our focus from the various accounts that have been offered of the nature of human difference, and pay attention instead to the way in which these accounts serve to buttress or undermine the political and economic institutions --such as missions in the 16th and 17th centuries, or slavery in the 19th century-- that benefit from systemic inequality.

We might have an innate tendency to essentialize cultural difference-- and this tendency might help to explain why a polygenetic account of human origins suggested itself so easily to a thinker such as La Peyrère. If we do have this tendency, then it is certainly something to be acknowledged and dealt with as a real factor in intercultural strife. But it is a mistake to suppose that this innate disposition is at the same time a disposition to enmity. Indeed, one very broad implication of the consideration of the history of the concept of race for the cognitivist thesis about the innateness of the perception of racial difference is this: what we are constrained to think given the innate structure of our minds often tells us next to nothing about how that innate structure will be expressed in a particular cultural form and in particular historical circumstances.

*

Scott Atran, The Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science (Cambridge University Press, 1991).

James M. Blaut, The Colonizer's Model of the World (London: Guilford Press, 1993).

Francisco Gil-White, "Are Ethnic Groups Biological 'Species' to the Human Brain?: Essentialism in our Cognition of Some Social Categories," in Current Anthropology 42 (2001): 515-554.

John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Isaac La Peyrère, Relation de l'Islande (Paris: Louis Billaine, 1644).

---- ---- ---- ----. Prae-Adamitae, sive, Exercitatio super versibus duodecimo, decimotertio, & decimoquarto, capitis quinti Epistolae D. Pauli ad Romanos : quibus inducuntur primi homines ante Adamum conditi (Amsterdam, 1655).

Richard H. Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596-1676): His Life, Work, and Influence (Leiden: Brill, 1987).

Isaac La Peyrère, Relation from Iceland (1644)

[Please click 'continue reading' to see the original French text]

XXXII. I have told you that the Icelandic language is based on the ancient Runic language. Doctor Worm, who understands this Runic, and who has written a book on it, has assured me that Icelandic is the purest Runic that we have. As proof of this, the Icelandic characters of which Blefken gave an alphabet in his Relation, are Runic. And he also says that among these characters, there are some that are hieroglyphic, signifying entire words. The good man Angrimus dealt with this chapter in his Crimogée. And since this book is very rare in this country, as well, no doubt, as in the place where you are, you will be pleased that I should hold forth to you on the reading that I made of it, for in revealing to you the antiquity of the Icelandic language, it gives us a great knowledge of the antiquity of the North. 

XXIII. Angrimus says that the Annals of Iceland, which speak of the first inhabitants of the Arctic world, have them coming from an Asiatic prince, named Odin, whom others have called Ottin, who, pushed by the Roman armies that Pompeius commanded in Frigia Minor, took the northern route and ended up in these regisions with the Frigian troops following him. And good Angrimus affirms that the epoch of these Icelandic Annals does not go back any further than Odin. He assures nonetheless that many other peoples of the north have annals that are more ancient still, and that their Histories make mention of a prince called Norus, who gave the first laws to Norway, and built it into a kingdom. That Norus was a son of Thorré, king of Gotland and of Finland, the greatest, most virtuous, and most excellent prince of his era. That his peoples adord him like a God after his death. That Norway called the month of January Thorré, after his name. And that this name is still retained today in Iceland. That King Thorré had a daughter of great beauty, named Goa, who was kidnapped by a foreign prince. That his brother Norus pursued the kidnapper, and that the month following January was called Goa, which is the same name that the Icelanders continue to use today for the month of February. Angrimus next provides a genealogical map of the predecessors of Norus who were placed by the peoples of the North among the gods, one of the sea, one of the winds, one of the snow, one of the cold. And he speaks of one, among others, whom they worshipped as the god of fire, who was well endowed, and lame like the Vulcan of the Greeks, but the best built and most beautiful of all men. That in view of his great beauty they caled him Halogie, which is to say 'big and beautiful flame'. The genealogy goes down to a nephew of Norus, named Gilve, at which point, the Chronicle relates, the great Asiatic Odin arrived in the North.

XXXIV. This diversity of the [different] annals obliged Angrimus to go back even further than those first kings of Norway, and to relate the origin of the peoples of the North to the ancient Canaanite giants, whom Joshua chased from the promised land, and who came to inhabit this country; these were giants like the first inhabitants of the Arctic world, and from whom, it is believed, the first Goths descended, whose name signifies 'giants'. Now, Monsieur, it would not be out of line for me to say a few words at this point, both about this great Asiatic Odin, as well as about the received opinion in this country, that the first men of the North were Canaanites.

XXXV. The great Asiatic Odin was worshipped throughout all of the North, under the name of Mercury, in view of his excellent spirit. It is believed that he is the first author of poetry and magic in the North, which is so well-known and renowned everywhere. I have spoken to you of his poetry, and I would have much to say about his magic, but the subject would warrant its own treatment, which I will reserve for another time. I will content myself with telling you, for now, that I cannot be surprised enough at the negligence of so many men, who adhere to these inveterate errors with so little reflection, and who let themselves get carried away by them without resistance. In the same vein, [I am surprised that] the more these errors give a shock to good sense, and the less they have of plausibility, the more these men believe them, and the more they try to make others believe them. For, Monsieur, what is the hope of being able to accept all of the fables that they tell about this Asiatic Odin, and what connection could such weak fables have with the age of Pompeius, which is an age so well known, and so historical?

...

Monsieur,

Your very humble and very obedient servant, La Peyrère

First written in Copenhagen, 18 December, 1644

Nature's Publics

The Making of Publics for Knowledge of the Natural World in Europe, 1500-1800

March 18, 2010 to March 20, 2010

McGill University, Rare Books HSSL & Thomson House, 3650 McTavish

*

The history of European society and culture between ca. 1500-1800 is characterized in part by new discoveries about the heavens and the material or physical characteristics of the earth and its inhabitants and the widespread distribution of this new knowledge. Keynote talks include Lesley Cormack (Simon Fraser University), Mary E. Fissell (Johns Hopkins University) and Stephen D. Snobelen (University of King’s College and Dalhousie University).

Papers are devoted to the collective relations of the investigators; the agencies or groups engaged in publishing or disseminating knowledge of the new discoveries; the forms and mechanisms employed in the communication of ideas or information about the natural world; the institutions or communities in which this new knowledge was received and assessed or criticized; or the role played by “nature’s publics” in shaping or reshaping conceptions of public life, including ideas about membership in publics and about their practices.

Presentation

Welcome and Introductory Remarks
5:30 PM to 6:00 PM  view this sub-event

McGill University, McLennan Library, Rare Books & Special Collections, 4th Floor

Paul Yachnin (McGill University)
Diane Koen, Director of Libraries (Interim) (McGill University)
David Harris Sacks (Reed College)

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Plenary

First Plenary
6:00 PM to 7:00 PM  view this sub-event

McGill University, McLennan Library, Rare Books & Special Collections, 4th Floor

Chair: Paul Yachnin

• Lesley Cormack, ''Mapping Publics in Early Modern England'' (presented at Nature's Publics: The making of publics for knowledge of the natural world in Europe, 1500-1800, McGill University, Montreal, 18 March 2010). 

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Reception

Reception
7:00 PM to 8:00 PM  view this sub-event

McGill University, McLennan Library, Rare Books & Special Collections, 4th Floor

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Session

Session 1
March 19, 2010
9:00 AM to 10:45 AM  view this sub-event

McGill University, Thomson House Ballroom, 3650 McTavish St.

Chair Justin Smith (Concordia University)

• David A. Boruchoff, ''Nature and the Moral Intentions of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s History of the Indies'' (presented at Nature's Publics: The making of publics for knowledge of the natural world in Europe, 1500-1800, McGill University, Montreal, 19 March 2010). 
• Florence C. Hsia, ''Curious and Edifying Letters: Jesuit New Worlds and their Publics'' (presented at Nature's Publics: The making of publics for knowledge of the natural world in Europe, 1500-1800, McGill University, Montreal, 19 March 2010). 
• Elizabeth Yale, ''Natural History by Subscription: Learned Scientific Printing as Public Good in Seventeenth-Century Britain'' (presented at Nature's Publics: The making of publics for knowledge of the natural world in Europe, 1500-1800, McGill University, Montreal, 19 March 2010). 

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Plenary

Second Plenary
March 19, 2010
11:00 AM to 12:15 PM  view this sub-event

McGill University, Thomson House Ballroom, 3650 McTavish St.

• Mary Fissell, ''When the Public was also Private: Reading Aristotle’s Masterpiece'' (presented at Nature's Publics: The making of publics for knowledge of the natural world in Europe, 1500-1800, McGill University, Montreal, 19 March 2010). 

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Session

Session 2
March 19, 2010
1:45 PM to 3:00 PM  view this sub-event

McGill University, Thomson House Ballroom, 3650 McTavish St.

Chair: Mary E. Fissell

• Margaret Carlyle, ''Making Anatomy Public: The Forums, Forms, and Females of the Medical Enlightenment'' (presented at Nature's Publics: The making of publics for knowledge of the natural world in Europe, 1500-1800, McGill University, Montreal, 19 March 2010). 
• Tilmann Walter, ''The Medical ‘Republic of Letters’ and the Early Modern Scientific Revolution in Germany'' (presented at Nature's Publics: The making of publics for knowledge of the natural world in Europe, 1500-1800, McGill University, Montreal, 19 March 2010). 

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Session

Session 3
March 19, 2010
3:15 PM to 5:00 PM  view this sub-event

McGill University, Thomson House Ballroom, 3650 McTavish St.

Chair: Steve Snobelen (University of King’s College, Halifax and Dalhousie University)

• Jean-François Gauvin, ''Salvation through Harmonie: Mersenne, the Organ, and the Christian Dissemination of Natural Philosophical Knowledge'' (presented at Nature's Publics: The making of publics for knowledge of the natural world in Europe, 1500-1800, McGill University, Montreal, 19 March 2010). 
• Vera Keller, ''Mining Tacitus: Bacon, Bornitz, Bernegger, and the Technologies of State'' (presented at Nature's Publics: The making of publics for knowledge of the natural world in Europe, 1500-1800, McGill University, Montreal, 19 March 2010). 

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Session

Session 4
March 20, 2010
9:30 AM to 10:45 AM  view this sub-event

McGill University, Thomson House Ballroom, 3650 McTavish St.

Chair: David Boruchoff

• Louis Caron, ''Witchcraft and the Rise of Public Experimental Philosophy'' (presented at Nature's Publics: The making of publics for knowledge of the natural world in Europe, 1500-1800, McGill University, Montreal, 20 March 2010). 
• Oded Rabinovitch, ''A Tale of Three Chameleons: Observation, Writing, and the Early Académie des Sciences in the Literary Field'' (presented at Nature's Publics: The making of publics for knowledge of the natural world in Europe, 1500-1800, McGill University, Montreal, 20 March 2010). 

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Plenary

Third Plenary
March 20, 2010
11:00 AM to 12:15 PM  view this sub-event

McGill University, Thomson House Ballroom, 3650 McTavish St.

Chair: Lesley Cormack

• Stephen Snobelen, ''Newton in Public: Newtonmania in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France'' (presented at Nature's Publics: The making of publics for knowledge of the natural world in Europe, 1500-1800, McGill University, Montreal, 20 March 2010). 

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Session

Session 5
March 20, 2010
1:30 PM to 2:45 PM  view this sub-event

McGill University, Thomson House Ballroom, 3650 McTavish St.

Chair: Nicholas Dew (McGill University)

• Sarah Easterby-Smith, ''Cultivating Commerce: Amateurs, Botanists, and the Plant Trade in Paris, c. 1760-1789'' (presented at Nature's Publics: The making of publics for knowledge of the natural world in Europe, 1500-1800, McGill University, Montreal, 20 March 2010). 
• Elizabeth Hyde, ''Charles de Sercy's Théâtre du Jardinage, or Marketing to Nature's Publics in Seventeenth Century France'' (presented at Nature's Publics: The making of publics for knowledge of the natural world in Europe, 1500-1800, McGill University, Montreal, 20 March 2010). 

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Session

Session 6
March 20, 2010
3:00 PM to 4:15 PM  view this sub-event

McGill University, Thomson House Ballroom, 3650 McTavish St.

Chair: John Baird

• Peter Hansen, ''Discovery of the Glacières: Making Up Mont Blanc'' (presented at Nature's Publics: The making of publics for knowledge of the natural world in Europe, 1500-1800, McGill University, Montreal, 20 March 2010). 
• Dániel Margócsy, ''The Price of Shipping: Trading with Curiosities in Early Modern Europe'' (presented at Nature's Publics: The making of publics for knowledge of the natural world in Europe, 1500-1800, McGill University, Montreal, 20 March 2010). 

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Discussion

Roundtable Discussion
March 20, 2010
4:30 PM to 5:30 PM  view this sub-event

McGill University, Thomson House Ballroom, 3650 McTavish St.

Moderator: David Harris Sacks

Animals, Humans, and the Shifting Boundaries of Community

Forthcoming in Markus Wild and Klaus Petrus (Eds.), Animal Minds and Animal Morals.

Click below for a pdf version. Comments welcome. Please do not cite without permission.

Download WildAnimal

Footnotes I Had to Cut from my Book in Order to Respect the Word Limit

(but that I hope to develop elsewhere)

1. [F]or many authors in the early modern period, the modalities of nutrition also mark one of the fundamental difference between animals and plants.  An animal is distinguished from a plant in part in that, whereas the plant absorbs its nutriment, ‘earth’, directly through its roots, the animal has a specialized system of the body, a digestive tract, and this can only appropriate other living beings, plants or animals, for the sustenance of the animal body.  This difference hangs with the other fundamental difference between animals and plants that was often emphasized from Aristotle on, namely, the capacity for locomotion in animals, and its absence in plants: the plant’s stationary existence is made possible by its ability to absorb its food directly through its roots, while the animal’s need to ingest organic matter that is scattered throughout its environment necessitates that it be able to move around in order to seek its nutriment out.  Daniel Sennert puts this point as follows: “But Animals (seeing they are more perfect than Plants) they were to have more exquisite diet than such as the Earth affords.  And therefore they had not only tast given them to try their meats, but also members wherewith to receive the same, and turn it into juyce fit to nourish the body, viz. The Mouth and Stomach… Now this Aliment received is in several Animals severally changed into Nutriment properly so called, or an humor which is the immediate aliment of the body, which when either by Nature it self (the heat in the process of time devouring the same) or by violence (as in sickness and other cases) it comes to be consumed, the life is extinguished” (Sennert Thirteen Books of Natural Philosophy, Book 7: “Of Animals or Living Creatures,” Chapter 10: “Of the Differences of Living Creatures,” 389). Perhaps not since Porphyry’s On Abstinence from Animal Flesh had the ontological difference between plants and animals been so clearly put.

2. Leibniz’s most famous conflict with a contemporary concerning the issue of perpetual motion was with Joachim Becher, who was so infuriated by Leibniz’s dismissal of his purported invention that he is inspired in his Närrische Weisheit und weise Narrheit [Ignorant Wisdom and Wise Ignorance] of 1680 to ridicule Leibniz’s inventions at great length, including Leibniz’s supposed plan to invent a carriage that could travel from Amsterdam to Hannover in six hours.  See A I iii, 278 / Gerland 119 / MK 69.  In March, 1683 Leibniz gives his own account to the Landgraf Ernst concerning the value of Becher’s supposed invention: “This man is well enough known through his exaggerations, which are mixed with black malice.  One need only read his books in order to be convinced of this... He set upon me because I stood in the way of a certain alchemical swindle he had planned... What he says about the six-hour journey of the wagon from Hannover to Amsterdam belongs to his invention... For one would have to lose one’s reason in order to have ever thought of such a thing” (A I iii, 278).

3. In a 1669 report to Oldenburg from Leiden, Samuel Colepresse worries that “it may be Hollanders have other Testicles than English men.”  In any case, Colepresse will not be the one to settle the matter.  Commenting on De Graaf’s search for an answer to this question, he declares in evident exasperation: “Truelie should De Graaf desire ye experiment on me I should looke but soure on’t” (The Correspondence of Henry OIdenburg, ed. and tr. A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965-86), v. VI, 193).

'Animal' as Category: Some Practical Consequences

[Forthcoming in Klaus Petrus and Markus Wild, Animal Minds and Animal Morals, 2010]

Abstract. The modern conception of moral status, in which humans are supposed to have absolute moral commitment to all other humans, while having no properly moral commitments, but only indirect ones, to the vast majority of other animals, is the result of a long and complex genealogy, and one that has yet to be written. If I speak of genealogy here it is because, with Nietzsche (1887), Foucault (1975), and Bernard Williams (1994), I wish to suggest that an investigation into the deep historical sources of a common assumption of the modern world might reveal, at the same time, the extent to which this assumption is merely or largely verbal, serving as the ad hoc account we give of a system of practices which only begins to make sense when we consider the way these practices emerge out of a world that did not share our assumptions. 

But how could the human-animal dichotomy have a genealogy at all? What could be more deep-seated, more natural, than this? It is certainly true that the idea that humans are a variety of animal is a very new one. But the default assumption throughout most of human history has been that animals are themselves people, if not exactly in the same way we are (Durkheim and Mauss, 1902; ; Lévi-Strauss 1962; Sahlins 1976). Animals and humans were for most of the history of homo sapiens members of a single, all-encompassing community, in which each member was capable of a certain kind of rational activity grounded in intention and in anticipation of the future; in which members of each kind had reciprocal obligations towards members of all other kinds (even if these obligations did not involve refraining from killing, whether one was to refrain or not was not centrally determined by whether the creature in question was an animal person or a human person); and in which there was no meaningful division between nature and culture, or between the boundaries of the human world and the vast expanses of inhuman and indifferent wilderness that surround it.

Nietzsche, Foucault, and Williams were interested, each in his own way, in determining how we came to account for the range of ways we treat other human beings, and in each case the answer had to do with the invention of something we call 'morality' over the course of Western history. I want to argue in turn that if morality is new, and the loss of a view of the world on which animals are persons is also new, it may be that these two developments are part of a package. That is, coming to think of people as having something we might call 'moral status', rather than just being governed by shame and necessity, or by prohibitions that impose themselves as if from outside as quasi-physical forces, rather than flowing from within as a result of one's autonomous agency, involved a corresponding need to sharply determine the boundaries of the realm of beings endowed with such status. The extension of moral status to all human beings, to put this another way, might have as its flipside the limitation of moral status to only human beings.

From an earlier model on which beings derived their importance from, let us say, their ecological role in a socio-natural theater that included human beings, a new picture emerged on which moral status had to be articulated in terms of criteria based upon the internal capacities of the different kinds of creature. The question was no longer: do these creatures play a vital role in the ecology that includes us?, but rather, are these creatures inwardly like us? Wherein this likeness is to consist would be a question that would receive different answers over the course of history, but most would be variations on the idea that, whereas we have rational souls, or reason, or agency, or language, or recursive language, or a developed neocortex, they do not. The exact way in which these distinctions were to make all the difference, or in which practical consequences were to follow from them, was never entirely clear.  As Richard Sorabji (1995) has noted, "they lack syntax, therefore we may eat them," is hardly a compelling inference.

On the account I wish to articulate, the discovery that there is something universally shared by human beings, regardless of country or clime, regardless of whether the humans in question are friends or enemies, meant at the same time that species became the sole criterion for the determination of the bounds of community.  Human beings came to have moral status because they had this new thing, morality, and for the first time the range of what you can or cannot do to them came to be determined by this new internal capacity.  At the same time, the range of what you can do to beings that are not characterized by that internal capacity grew without limit. The genealogy of morality, as the key defining feature of all human beings, goes together with what we might call the genealogy of animality: the creation of that class of beings that, as non-human, lies outside of the sphere of moral consideration altogether. 

*

Michel Foucault, Surveillir et punir. Naissance de la prison. Paris, Gallimard, 1975.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage. Paris, 1962.

Marcell Mauss and Emile Durkheim, De quelques formes primitives de classification. Paris, 1902.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral [1887], in Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. De Gruyter, 1985.

Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason. University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate. Cornell University Press, 1995.

Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity. University of California Press, 1994.