“When we claim that there is, on one side, a natural world and, on the other, a human world, we are simply proposing to say, after the fact, that an arbitrary portion of the actors will be stripped of all action and that another portion, equally arbitrary, will be endowed with souls,”
The interesting observation in the discussion is just how quickly people turn apprehensive when any notion of individual human supremacy is challenged, even when it rests on entirely arbitrary distinctions. Rather than just focussing on the natural world it seems even more obvious when it comes to institutions. Nation states, corporations, churches, all of them vastly outlive their individual members the same way a human outlives its individual cells. And just like we attribute agency to human beings rather than solely their cells, it makes perfect sense to think of non-human entities in the same way.
A paragraph that stuck with me was Yuval Noah Harari's description of agriculture:
"“Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn't easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn't like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women labored long days weeding under the scorching sun. . . . The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”