Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

by Richard Beck

This is largely due to the fact that humans tend to reason about categories in terms of essences. That is, when we make distinctions of kind we tend to think that some essential property distinguishes the two groups being classified.6 For example, when we contrast humans with animals we tend to not see the difference as one of degree. Rather, we speculate that some intrinsic and essential property is possessed by humans that is lacking in animals (e.g., humans have souls and animals do not). Obviously, education and critical thinking can override these essentialist accounts. But essentialist reasoning seems to be our natural, unconscious, and default way of thinking about group membership.