Personhood For Non-Humans

Elizabeth Price Foley is appalled at some recent court decisions, and the trend.

I’ve got mixed feelings on this. I agree that they shouldn’t be given full human rights, but I do think we should make distinctions as a function of intelligence, and perhaps even recognize some degree of moral agency (e.g., dolphins). It also raises the issue of how we would treat extraterrestrials as a function of those things.

12 thoughts on “Personhood For Non-Humans”

  1. Dolphins hell, killer whales play with their food. I mean, have you seen what they do with seals and penguins? Some of them need to be locked up; teach the rest of ’em a lesson.

    1. That scene when a pod of whales are trying to swamp the seal on the ice flow…. yeah, that was alarming behavior… a clear sign of hate involved in the commission of a crime.

  2. At issue here is the one of sentience versus sapience. Both terms are ill-defined, but I would hold (and so would many others) that sentience is a term of less import than sapience. Sentience could be defined as the ability to take in information from the outside and act upon it, usually in a physical way; defined that way, sentience goes all the way down to things like thermostats. (Sense temperature, operate a switch accordingly.) Arguably, by that definition all animals of any sort are sentient to varying degrees.

    Sapience is trickier. One component is probably a sense of self; do you recognise yourself in the mirror? (Not all animals do.)

    Based on that, and for what it’s worth, I would call chimps, bonobos, orangutans and gorillas sapient and also maybe dolphins, orcas and elephants. Some of these may be equivalently sapient to humans; it’s difficult to communicate with water-dwellers.

    I think it’s also worth noting that some chimps and one or two gorillas have shown a capacity to communicate, grammatically, about as well as young human children. (They have to use sign language because their vocal cords aren’t finely-enough controlled for them to be able to talk.)

    1. That turns out not to be the case (the grammatical part). Steven Pinker has debunked the “apes speaking sign language” trope. Check out the story of Nim Chimpsky for the best look at this topic.

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