"...an appeals court argued that chimpanzees do not participate in society and cannot be held accountable for their actions."
Nor can babies, but they are legal persons, aren't they?
Nor can babies, but they are legal persons, aren't they?
Apologies for the snark.
If 5-year-olds could file lawsuits... the world would be pretty messy.
Some chimps are actors in films, performers in circuses, etc.
A chimp is able to rip a person apart or crush their head in much more easily than a baby, so I don't think the original analogy works.
What I was saying was that babies rarely have to be held accountable for any serious action - absent heavy machinery or dangerous materials, a baby can do very limited damage. A naked chimp who's a bit moody, though, can easily cause someone serious harm.
If we are not going to hold that chimp responsible for what they did just as we would with a person (because punishment would also be inhumane or nonproductive), then chimps don't match up perfectly with babies in terms of the need for legal rights and representation.
This is also true about, say, a severely autistic adult, who we still deem to be worthy of a wide variety of rights.
I agree that it would likely not be a good idea for chimps to live in human society, but I think a true rational analysis without invoking divine right would find that if we consider human individuals as possessing a basic right to life, we would find the same for chimps, dolphins, and probably many other animals (perhaps all the way to insects and bacteria).
The idea that they all need to live in our society to be treated fairly by the legal system is one that I think needs reexamining. Dolphins, for example, could simply never live in human society because they live underwater and humans do not. But we could find that a human who abuses a dolphin is depriving the dolphin of some legal right to live a non-abused life (I don't know what the legal term here is).
I think this is new legal territory, but I have a feeling that environmental protection lawyers will soon try to show that animals have inalienable rights just like humans. (I say it's new, but I also know that people have been working on this for a long time.)
So chimps and babies interface with society in different ways, but I feel like they both have a right to life. I mean, religious conservatives say that a fertilized egg has all the same rights as a living human - I see no reason why dolphins and non-human apes should be treated any differently. I know there is a legal history of treating animals like inanimate objects, but that doesn't seem to follow the spirit of our laws protecting the sovereignty of intelligent individuals. I see that changing somehow in the future.
Are a woman using sign language to communicate with other humans participating in society? After all she is not able to speak...
And when is a female gorilla doing exactly the same?.
Are an human payed by testing new cosmetics a member of society?
And if is a rabbit payed in carrots?
Conversely, many tables have 'appeared' in film, circuses, etc. so I would suggest that's too low a bar.
My personal philosophy is only to entertain the question of personhood with entities that are or most likely will become able to pose that question. So yes, if they eventually find a way to 'uplift' chimps or something like that, I'll be happy to welcome them. Conversely, it makes no sense to entertain the notion of personhood unless and until the chimps have done so themselves.
you're just speaking from a position of the species [violently] dominating the planet. Chimps wouldn't need your prized personhood status (existing only in the human imagination) at all if not as a way to minimize violence the human species would apply to the chimps otherwise.
Anyway, it sounds like you've never read Catch-22.
Everything else currently living? They're racing their hearts out, but they do not understand the nature of the race, where they came from, where they might be going, where they are located, where their home came from, etc. They don't even seem to wonder about these things, let alone have methods for finding the answers.
So now that we've won the race, do we loop back and try to chat with the creatures that haven't made it yet? Cheer on the remaining contestants? Or do we find a new race to participate in? Why not create a new race?
We are a tiny portion of the universe that is capable of introspection. Literally parts of the universe that are capable of examining the rest of the universe. We could sit around and wait for other parts of the universe to gain this ability as well, or we could throw everything we have at building a greater ability to introspect on the universe, using whatever tools we have at our disposal to do so. If that means 'cannibalizing' other potentially introspective parts of the universe to further ourselves, so be it. If experimenting on lesser lifeforms allows us to make humanity more robust, then I think that is what we should do.
What that implies about what humans do is a whole other question, because humans aren't racing anybody. (But I think that was somewhat your point.)
[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/kt/evolutions_are_stupid_but_work_an...
Being instances of this cutting-edge phenomenon, we (individuals) have the opportunity to exploit what evolution inadvertently created. We can push this phenomenon even further.
We're not the most extreme phenomenon by any means; atomic blasts, neutron stars and black holes, the formation of the planets... these are all more extreme than ourselves in a number of ways. But in the "introspection" metric, we're the best that we have evidence for. Moreso, introspection is the only thing that makes us special. Examining the world seems to be the one thing that we do better than anything else.
[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/va/measuring_optimization_power/
Your conception of development is still anthropocentric.
of course. I'd wish that my human brain could produce super/trans-human concepts :)
> Why is inter-species communication the measure of development, and not say, running speed?
I think it is most probably that we'd try to communicate with aliens instead of trying to compete on running speed with them.
I'm not deeply invested into these topics (legal or otherwise), but as your typical 30-year old engineer who grew up on Star Trek, I guess I've always wondered if it's justified to not treat intelligent animals as persons just because they're dumber than us and/or not interested in negotiation. When certain criteria are met (e.g. just from the top of my head, the ability to be sufficiently self-aware to be aware of incarceration and not like it) it seems hard not to. Ultimately it just comes down to competing for living space and picking sides, perhaps.
So if Data shows up someday, I'm happy to welcome him. But I'm not going to go into contortions over how intelligent something is or might be unless they're able to pose these questions themselves.
I've never been impressed by the 'speciesist' argument, either. I have yet to find a person who has not killed a mosquito, or who is against wiping out deadly diseases and I find the very construction of the word designed to be emotionally manipulative.
do you honestly not see a difference in sentience between mosquito and a chimp?
And all such distinctions are, by definition, 'speciesist'.
not. Recognizing difference in sentience level not necessarily means "specie-ism", for example between a human with severe autism and a "normal" human.
Treating mosquitoes differently from humans is, by definition, speciesist. That's among the reasons I think the concept of speciesism is absurd.
So you'll have a hard time unless you add lots of special cases to it.
I think that's an interesting yard stick worth discussing. The problem seems to be to me that it leaves you free to treat a creature as a non-person until it complains, and complains in a way you understand and recognize as asserting personhood. I think that's erring on the side of us making the right call in these matters, and giving the possible ramifications of getting it wrong, I think I'd prefer a more careful approach that doesn't put all of the burden of proof on the creature.
I do not have such evidence regarding chimps. As best I can tell, the studies where they attempted to teach them sign language show otherwise.
Self-defense does not invalidate speciesism.
If we weren't on the topic of animal rights, there would be no disagreement with the assessment of self-defense.
Interestingly, that also points to one sort of intelligence. That is to say, you can't assume anything about how a person will behave simply because of what race they are. You can reasonably do so with unintelligent animals (e.g. you can assume a mosquito will bite you, given a chance).
Because that's what these laws are meant to regulate. Other species also have rules that regulate their own communities.
Also, given that all species on the planet exist in the same evolutionary tree, I guess I find species distinctions somewhat arbitrary. What's the meaningful biological difference between a chimp and a not very smart human, really? It seems like a lot of the same stuff to me. Why do arguments end at species boundaries? They may be a legally uncooperative population, sure, but that can happen with groups of humans, too.
I'm not applying for sainthood here or anything; I'm a meat-eater, and I don't lose sleep at night over it - yet, anyway. But that I don't feel guilty doesn't necessarily make it right; I find these things worth mulling.
No, I'm saying that the concept of person is inherently linked to humanity (incl. human society) and therefore non-human creatures are only judged as "people" if they can approximate humanity to some level.
The fact that we find it natural that "smart" non-humans like chimpanzees and dolphins are better candidates to being classified as persons is evidence of that: after all, why should smartness/intelligence be the classifier? It's because that's what distinguishes us.
Also, given that all species on the planet exist in the same evolutionary tree, I guess I find species distinctions somewhat arbitrary. What's the meaningful biological difference between a chimp and a not very smart human, really?
That's like asking what's the meaningful difference in terms of physics between a human and a rock, since we're both bags of carbon. Law simply isn't designed to work at the biological level. It's a social construction.
Should functional chimps who show emotions, bonding, skills and reasoning ability be given fewer rights than human babies with no brains but heartbeat, even though we know for fact that they can never be functional members of society? Are our rights based on DNA or potential?
My preference is to treat entire species as non-human persons once even a few members have demonstrated partial intelligence. So cetacean, hominoid, psittacine, canine, feline, equine, bovine, and porcine could easily fall into that category. However, since I hear bovine and porcine are delicious, I don't expect them to get any rights in my life time. Maybe in a few centuries once lab-grown meat is plentiful.
In the meantime, I don't see why we can't treat intelligent species that are not commonly eaten as non-human persons with basic rights.
The laws against cruelty are directed towards humans. They forbid specific behavior of humans which involve animals.
In the same way, desecrating a cemetary or destruction of property is also forbidden, yet neither graveyards nor objects hold rights themselves.
Or, to put it another way: if humanity consisted purely of sociopaths and there was no such thing as a maternal instinct, babies would not have rights; every human being would likely have a childhood consisting of learning to defend themselves in order to escape captivity/slavery at the hands of their parents.