Emotional responses of humans

The argument

This argument locates the line between humans and animals in behaviour rather than in anatomy or intelligence — specifically, in the outward behaviours through which emotion is expressed. Humans, it holds, are set apart by an ability to feel emotions more deeply than other animals, and the evidence for that depth is what the body visibly does in response. The first example is crying. Humans are the only species capable of crying as an emotional response to a distressing situation. The range matters as much as the fact: people weep in reaction to a multitude of feelings, from sadness to joy, and the same behaviour serves an entire spectrum of them. A behaviour that can be triggered by sadness and by happiness alike is not a simple reflex but the outward sign of an emotional life complex enough to overflow in more than one direction. The second example is blushing. Humans are the only species known to redden in the face in reaction to a situation, and the behaviour is involuntary, and it occurs for a variety of reasons. Its significance here is partly that researchers have confirmed blushing is likely an emotional response, and partly that it remains unclear which emotional responses cause it. The difficulty of pinning the behaviour to a single cause is itself the point: the emotional states behind it are too tangled to be sorted neatly. Taken together, crying and blushing show a depth and complexity of emotional response that no other species displays. Since both are behaviours rather than internal states, they are observable evidence, and on this view it is behaviour of this kind that separates humans from animals.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Crying does not actually separate humans from other animals. When defined as an emotional behavior that is accompanied by wailing and screaming, crying is actually a response seen across many species of animals. Similar to infants crying out as a way to gain attention, young primates will cry out as a form of communication or in response to negative emotions. While tears for emotional reasons are unique to humans, the concept of crying is not.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The counter-argument on record separates two claims that the premise merges. Emotional tearing does appear to be uniquely human, but crying as a distress vocalisation is widespread — young primates cry out to summon attention much as human infants do — so the behaviour is not the dividing line. 'Feeling emotions more deeply' is in any case not measurable from the outside, and no method for comparing depth across species is offered. [Rejecting P2] Blushing depends on a visible response in facial skin, so its apparent uniqueness may reflect what can be observed rather than what occurs. The premise treats an observational limit as a species boundary. [Rejecting P3] The argument undercuts itself here: it concedes that which emotions produce blushing is unclear, then cites that same uncertainty as proof of complexity. Not knowing what a response signals is not evidence that it signals something sophisticated. [Rejecting C] Behaviours conventionally taken to indicate complex emotion — grief, consolation, reconciliation after conflict — are documented in elephants, corvids and great apes, so an argument resting on emotional response has to explain why two physiological markers outweigh those, and it does not.