Classifying Beings As Human

Sometimes conversations with moronic people can provide plenty of material to write about.  Recently, I found myself refuting a person who changed the topic every few minutes, contradicting himself many times throughout his rants.  There is one subject we discussed which I want to explore here.  At one point, the person demanded that I define what it means to be a human, and I described humans as consciousnesses in bipedal, mammalian bodies.  All of the objections I received were asinine.  I was immediately asked if people born without legs aren't people.

There is a sense in which I refer to myself as human and describe other beings like me as bearing the status of human as well.  If a being has a body that is as similar to mine in terms of taxonomical physical structure as it can be, it will have two legs and walk upright, as I do.  However, even humans born without legs are bipedal in that they would walk on two legs if they had legs to use.  This is why one is perfectly rational to call humans bipedal creatures even though some humans might be born without legs or lose their legs post-birth.

Even further, to maintain consistency, the person in question would have to deny that dogs are quadrupeds, as if one cannot summarize the nature of dogs by emphasizing that most of them walk on all fours.  At this point, he must resort to making purely arbitrary distinctions between different species, since all of them could be described as consciousnesses within bodies--but that definition alone does not account for the physical and physiological differences between the bodies of different creatures.

This fallacious slanderer proceeded to say that he knows which beings are persons because he has a "sense" of what beings are like him.  Even if my definition was flawed, his is rooted in feelings!  After erroneously accusing me of being inconsistent and irrational, he ultimately framed his definition of human around what triggers a subjective "sense" that another being can be placed in the same category as him.

In an ultimate sense, only a religious definition can capture the foundational essence of what makes all humans metaphysically human without delving into scientific taxonomy--all creatures who bear the image of God are human.  Of course, this does not emphasize the specific physical nature of the human body.  It doesn't need to.  But from a biological perspective, it is a brute fact that humans are bipedal creatures.