But it is precisely with a view to sustaining the philosophical coherence of this kind of position, with its

appeal to the distinctive role of human imagination and sympathy in generating moral response, that we
need, I submit, to defend human exceptionalism, and resist blurring the human-animal divide. Diamond
herself, although influential on posthumanism, fully accepts this when she argues that the concept of the
‘human being’ is ‘the main source of that moral sensibility which we may then be able to extend to
nonhuman animals’. In explanation, she writes,

[…] if we appeal to people to prevent suffering, and we, in our appeal, try to obliterate the distinction
between human beings and animals and just get people to speak or think of ‘different species of
animals’, there is no footing left from which to tell us what we ought to do, because it is not members of
one among species of animals that have moral obligations to anything. The moral expectations of other
human beings demand something of me as other than an animal; and we do something like
imaginatively read into animals something like such expectations when we think of vegetarianism as
enabling us to meet a cow's eyes. There is nothing wrong with that; there is something wrong with trying
to keep that response and destroy its foundation.15

Or as she has earlier put it, ‘the ways in which we mark what human life is belong to the source of moral
life, and no appeal to the prevention of suffering which is blind to this can in the end be anything but
self-destructive16 (Stanley Cavell reveals something of the same sensibility when he writes, ‘what is so
human is that we share the fact with other animals, that animals are also our others. That we are
animals. Being struck with this is something one might call ‘seeing us as human’. It is a feeling of
wonder’17).

Extending on this, I would argue that we have to recognize not only that humans are alone in the
position to extend moral status to other animals, but also that in the absence of the distinctive concept of
the ‘human’ there can be no form of moral discrimination whatsoever, no argument even to the effect
that animals should be treated on a par with us as subjects, and so forth…; and while it may be true that
we cannot finally know how the world is subjectively experienced by other creatures, we know enough
to know that they do not represent us either cognitively, or morally, or aesthetically; nor can they think of
themselves as having responsibility towards us in the way that many humans do towards them. I am not
denying here that some companion animals, dogs in particular, will sometimes exercise quite striking
forms of care and concern for their particular owners or handlers. What I mean is that other animal
species do not conceive of, nor exercise, any universally applicable form of concern for the members of
other animal species, humans included. I mean, too, that they have not produced representations of us
humans − whether orally or in writing or pictorially − nor philosophical arguments in any form about their
relations with us. The sensibility that makes us (or should make us) hesitate about assimilating other
animal species too closely to human beings must surely also allow us to recognize the extent of failure
of reciprocity at this level between ourselves and other creatures. Not only can no other animal
recognize a right or feel an obligation to respect it; most other animals are also profoundly indifferent to
the welfare of other species beings, and fortunately so in many ways. Most animal species, including
some of the more popular with human beings, would die of starvation were they to experience any
human-style moral compunction about the suffering of the other creatures they daily catch, tear apart
and eat alive. What is more, none of them can begin to imagine what it is like to be a human being, let
alone write about that imagining. In its narrative of saintly self-abnegation to animal interest, Seamus
Heaney's poem, ‘St Kevin and the Blackbird’, offers a poignant reflection in its opening verses on some
of these extreme asymmetries of sensibility:

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.

The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so
One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest
Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the
 tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,
Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and flown.18
Human exceptionality is here manifest, not in some arrogant indifference to animal well-being, but in
self-abnegation to the animal's ends. Whether it be prayer, compassion, imagination, or the writing of
poetry: they all, in differing ways, speak to the nature of the abyss between ourselves and all other
animals, however divergent they are in their particular species characteristics and capacities. This abyss
should be respected both culturally and politically even as we continue to ponder its implications and
what we should do about it.