Abstract

The habits of thought, language, and experience that preserve human uniqueness in relation to animal inferiority are challenged by primate studies, and how humans draw boundaries between themselves and animals seriously shapes how we understand justice among humans and animals. Primate studies demonstrate genetic and evolutionary connections between humans and chimpanzees, and chimpanzee studies observe forms or precursors of culture, learning, symbolic communication, tool use, language abilities, social economy, aesthetics, morality, and spirituality. Recognition of chimpanzee abilities requires philosophy and theology to reconsider concepts of nature-culture dualism, continuity and discontinuity, comparability and analogy, personhood, and morality and sin. How chimpanzees are distinguished from humans has implications for justice toward animals, women, and persons of color