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No, only corporations
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Dec 5, 2014 16:26
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I'd argue yes. They're clearly capable of self-awareness. They can both understand and, with tools such as sign language, communicate with us. They grasp concepts such as death and empathy, create tools, can think in abstract terms, can tell stories both true and imaginary, and generally display all the core aspects of what I'd consider personhood. Sure they'll never be as intelligent as a full grown healthy human, but neither do many human beings. I'd argue they should have at least the same rights as children, if not more, and the same should go for other animals such as parrots, elephants, corvids, pigs, many cetaceans, and any other beings found to display these traits of personhood. Perhaps, one day, even artificial beings will become complex and aware enough to qualify. And when they do, I will support rights for them as well.
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Dec 5, 2014 16:37
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Isn't an ape's ability to use sign language extremely limited?
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Dec 5, 2014 16:45
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DrSunshine posted:A further point I'd make is that we already grant certain rights of personhood on people who are incapable of bearing legal duties or submitting to societal responsibilities, such as those who have severe mental handicaps, the senile, and minors. So to me, the judges' ruling seems a tad odd if it's justified on the stated basis, since, on that basis, could we not then take that as an allowance to deny rights of personhood to the certain groups I mentioned? Also, it strikes me as a bit circular: the chimp does not have legal rights as a person because it cannot bear legal duties, and it cannot bear legal duties because it isn't a person! If we allowed apes to have "personhood" they'd all be in prison anyway. How do you make an animal understand you can't beat people up for looking at you, or murder them because you want their banana? They won't follow the laws of civilization because our laws make no sense in the natural world (I mean, why wouldn't you kill your neighbor for a banana if you wanted a banana?).
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Dec 5, 2014 17:00
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An Angry Bug posted:I'd argue yes. They're clearly capable of self-awareness. Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday Tulane University researchers say Quigley is now able to experience the crippling fear of impending death previously only accessible to humans. http://www.theonion.com/video/scientists-successfully-teach-gorilla-it-will-die,17165/
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Dec 5, 2014 17:02
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Miltank posted:Isn't an ape's ability to use sign language extremely limited? How is this a question?
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Dec 5, 2014 17:04
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How good are apes at sign language?
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Dec 5, 2014 17:43
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Miltank posted:How good are apes at sign language? Koko the gorilla understood approximately 1000 signs and 2000 english words. No understanding of grammar or symbolic speech. Somewhere around the level of an older toddler? Apparently an chimpanzee taught ASL to other chimps as well. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language#Primate_use_of_sign_language I don't know, if there is an animal that can understand even something as simple as "Get the apple from the third closet" etc. when it's done by sign language that is seriously creepy to me and I think we should really start thinking about categories of intelligence and rights beyond "human" and "everything else".
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Dec 5, 2014 17:55
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^^^^^^ Teaching them to understand basic instructions like "retrieve blue block from left box" is one of the things research into this thing focused on, and has to my knowledge been reasonably successful. Miltank posted:How good are apes at sign language? They're able to express emotional wants (like wanting to play a favorite game with a specific researcher), empathy and recognizing emotions through facial expression (asking why a researcher looks sad), future planning (wanting a specific thing the next day but not today), and abstract thinking and imagination (they can ask for things they've never see before like a green ball when they've only ever seen red balls). They'll never be on the level of humans and it's not well understood how much they themselves understand and how much is just them responding to learned patterns. But there is undeniably some level of communication going on. Who What Now fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Dec 5, 2014 |
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Dec 5, 2014 17:57
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Miltank posted:How good are apes at sign language? Very
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Dec 5, 2014 18:03
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You know what's also creepy? Like 2 million years from the equivalent of an chimpanzee to human, 10,000 years from wolf to an animal capable of understanding human speech and commands, working in official duties, leading a blind person around, serving as a therapeutic assistance, etc. with what all intents and purposes is minimal training. What if one day somebody starts selectively breeding chimpanzees or gorillas? Dolphins? Any other species that is way smarter then wolves to begin with? I mean it took us less then a blink in evolutionary terms to breed a perfect, intelligent slave race that eagerly does all our bidding and loves nothing more - without any knowledge of genetics or ability to manipulate them on a deep level. I'm pretty sure we're going to encounter other sentient species we have created way before we meet aliens.
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Dec 5, 2014 18:10
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We should breed a monkey butler race that is totally obsessed with getting us beer and making our houses clean.
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Dec 5, 2014 18:22
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Miltank posted:We should breed a monkey butler race that is totally obsessed with getting us beer and making our houses clean. That, or dogs with opposable thumbs. I've seen a dog that was perfectly capable of getting us beer already. However it's contribution to cleaning was mostly barking at the vacuum and finding a wet floor absolutely hilarious 
DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Dec 5, 2014 |
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Dec 5, 2014 18:23
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I would love to shake hands with a dog who had some grip e: I freaking love dogs they are so good.
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Dec 5, 2014 18:24
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Miltank posted:We should breed a monkey butler race that is totally obsessed with getting us beer and making our houses clean. Please consider that monkeys and great apes are not the same.
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Dec 5, 2014 18:30
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I wouldn't go as far as personhood, but I would support a much higher level of animal rights for most mammals. I would say all, but with what we've done to the habitats of many creatures (particularly Deer, Feral Pigs and Rats) in removing their natural predators, we have a responsibility to continue managing their populations.
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Dec 5, 2014 18:37
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Miltank posted:We should breed a monkey butler race that is totally obsessed with getting us beer and making our houses clean. One outta two. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayabukiya_Tavern quote:The tavern's owner, Kaoru Otsuka, owns two pet macaque monkeys who are currently employed to work at the location.[4] The first monkey, twelve-year-old "Yat-chan", is dressed in a shirt and shorts while he takes customers' drink orders and delivers them to the diners' tables.[4] The restaurant's owner, Otsuka, reported that he never initially taught the monkeys; Yat-chan first learned from watching him work. Otsuka said, "It all started one day when I gave him a hot towel out of curiosity and he brought the towel to the customer."[1] The younger macaque, named Fuku-chan, is currently four years old and has the main duty of bringing the attendees hot towels to clean their hands before ordering drinks.[5] Fuku-chan has only two years of experience, while Yat-chan has been reportedly performing the job for a longer time.[5]
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Dec 5, 2014 18:44
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I'm OK with rights for mammals as we give birds nothing. We triumphed over dinosaurs through sheer cosmic intervention, we better not give those fuckers an inch or we'll find ourselves scurrying through the terrifying legs of giant predatory crows or something. Damned feathered beasts have some internal memory of ruling over this planet, how else do you explain seagulls 
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Dec 5, 2014 18:45
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Personhood is for humans and I believe it fundamentally needs to be that way. You need to be that strict about that definition because the entire point is to protect human rights for humans who can't protect themselves, like the mentally handicapped. When you begin including non-human species, you dilute and confuse the definition, you inevitably end up with a tiered system, and a likely result is that you fail to protect humans as you should. I am aware that there are legal scholars who suggest that we can create a tiered system which will be functional and not a total loving disaster of untold proportions, but I am, uh, a bit pessimistic about that. I believe it's far more likely to hurt disabled humans than to help non-human primates — you turn a human being into a monkey in the eyes of the legal system, not the other way around. Do chimps and other highly intelligent animal species deserve a large subset of human rights? Absolutely and without a doubt. If there is an argument that chimpanzees should not be held in captivity, make it on its own merits, and devise a separate category to protect them and give them legal rights. Lab experimentation on chimps is basically dead in the water in the US — and I fully agree with that choice — and that was achieved without any tenuous personhood arguments. A tiered system of living being rights that has humans at the top is acceptable, but you can't develop your tiers out of characteristics, because the uncountable exceptions to any categorization besides species is going to bring you into a world of poo poo. Trying to break it down by "how intelligent" we perceive a species to be is impossible.
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Dec 5, 2014 18:55
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It's going to be a long, long time before the general population is ready to admit that animals can think and feel. For the longest time everyone assumed Chimps were #2 on the intelligence scale since they're so closely related to us, but it turns out that's not even the case. Cetaceans are more intelligent than apes and have shown highly complex social systems, and yet most of the world does very little to stop their slaughter. Most of the planet would be up in arms if a nation decided to start rounding up great apes and slaughtering them en masse for food, but whaling and dolphin hunting get only token condemnation. It's pretty horrific. Some are kept in cages, starved, and forced to perform for scraps. The ones that are hunted are killed in extremely painful and inhumane ways. Whales are killed with grenade tipped harpoons, and dolphins are rounded up by terrifying tactics and then stabbed once and allowed to bleed out. These are the most intelligent, social, and emotional creatures that we know of, aside from ourselves. I don't think personhood is really the answer, but I also don't believe that corporations should be legally people either. We need to seriously re-evaluate how we treat the world around us, but as long as there is money to be made, morals won't win out.
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Dec 5, 2014 18:59
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We already have a de facto tiered personhood system, though. The severely mentally handicapped or underdeveloped have all sorts of rights stripped from them. They cannot enter contracts, they do not have the freedom to be without contracts, they can't vote, they can't be employed, they don't have power of attorney over themselves, ect, ect. It's a tad late to be worrying about the slippery slope of denying certain rights to the mentally unfit when we've been doing it for decades.
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Dec 5, 2014 19:23
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Who What Now posted:We already have a de facto tiered personhood system, though. The severely mentally handicapped or underdeveloped have all sorts of rights stripped from them. They cannot enter contracts, they do not have the freedom to be without contracts, they can't vote, they can't be employed, they don't have power of attorney over themselves, ect, ect. It's a tad late to be worrying about the slippery slope of denying certain rights to the mentally unfit when we've been doing it for decades. That's actually part of my point. The severely mentally handicapped, children, the senile, are all cases at the margins in personhood, at least from a philosophical standpoint, and so we're already making arguments about the extent of their human rights. I don't see adding non-human animals to the mix as just tacking on a few more marginal cases; I see it as changing the definition that ensures we think of the handicapped, children, and the senile as people first and disability/age/whatever second.
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Dec 5, 2014 19:45
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disheveled posted:That's actually part of my point. The severely mentally handicapped, children, the senile, are all cases at the margins in personhood, at least from a philosophical standpoint, and so we're already making arguments about the extent of their human rights. I don't see adding non-human animals to the mix as just tacking on a few more marginal cases; I see it as changing the definition that ensures we think of the handicapped, children, and the senile as people first and disability/age/whatever second. the definition of personhood has ensured no such thing until recently
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Dec 5, 2014 19:54
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disheveled posted:That's actually part of my point. The severely mentally handicapped, children, the senile, are all cases at the margins in personhood, at least from a philosophical standpoint, and so we're already making arguments about the extent of their human rights. I don't see adding non-human animals to the mix as just tacking on a few more marginal cases; I see it as changing the definition that ensures we think of the handicapped, children, and the senile as people first and disability/age/whatever second. Personhood as a philosophical concept and as its colloquially used is waaaaaaaaay different than personhood as a legal concept. I believe most people are discussing it as the latter and not the former, or at least I am.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:06
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I guess the question I have is how do we apply giving animals rights when it comes to those we find in the wild. If for some reason a dolphin kills a gorilla is that counted as some form of murder? I know that that is a ludicrous example but would we have a duty to intervene if we ever saw the life of an intelligent creature threatened by a predator?
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Dec 5, 2014 20:13
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Ethiser posted:I guess the question I have is how do we apply giving animals rights when it comes to those we find in the wild. If for some reason a dolphin kills a gorilla is that counted as some form of murder? I know that that is a ludicrous example but would we have a duty to intervene if we ever saw the life of an intelligent creature threatened by a predator? I think you can already have legal protection even if you can't be held legally responsible for your actions. Children, mentally handicapped, etc. on the other hand people also have a legal duty to stop and restrict them from doing criminal actions. Harder in the case of dolphins who get up to some pretty sick poo poo actually. It's a pretty difficult question - should be intervene in inter-chimpanzee wars and the like? I think you would have a moral duty to intervene if you are capable of doing so and it doesn't put you in danger - and there are already official government organizations protecting endangered animals from poachers and the like. For non-human threats...I'd like to say that if I saw a baby gorilla getting chased by a lion I'd probably shoot the lion. I don't think anyone has a legal duty to intervene even in the case of humans...unless they are professionals like cops or soldiers.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:22
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Effectronica posted:I think that personhood for great apes, new caledonian crows, and other highly intelligent animals is hard to justify without inventing tiered levels of personhood, which might not be such a bad thing. But we can't reliably communicate with our intelligent brethren so it's hard to make them fully people socially, let alone legally. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:31
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computer parts posted:We specifically deny children a lot of legal ability though. Yes, but does that make them not-people? I think generally we'd be pretty loathe to say a baby isn't a person. And if you are willing to say that, you simply invite the question of at what age a human becomes a person, which in turn invites a ridiculous Sorites paradox. The question of whether an individual is of a particular species doesn't seem as if it should have anything to do with what rights are afforded them. It's convenient to think of there being something inherently special about being human, but there is no clear delineation between categories of organisms. Humanity is just a large tribe.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:44
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Smudgie Buggler posted:The question of whether an individual is of a particular species doesn't seem as if it should have anything to do with what rights are afforded them. It's convenient to think of there being something inherently special about being human, but there is no clear delineation between categories of organisms. Humanity is just a large tribe. There are very clear delineations between categories of organisms. That is why Taxonomy exists. Humans are special compared to every other known life form because we are the dominant animal on the planet so for better or worse we get to decide things.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:52
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DarkCrawler posted:You know what's also creepy? Like 2 million years from the equivalent of an chimpanzee to human, 10,000 years from wolf to an animal capable of understanding human speech and commands, working in official duties, leading a blind person around, serving as a therapeutic assistance, etc. with what all intents and purposes is minimal training. What if one day somebody starts selectively breeding chimpanzees or gorillas? Dolphins? Any other species that is way smarter then wolves to begin with? I mean it took us less then a blink in evolutionary terms to breed a perfect, intelligent slave race that eagerly does all our bidding and loves nothing more - without any knowledge of genetics or ability to manipulate them on a deep level. I'm pretty sure we're going to encounter other sentient species we have created way before we meet aliens. Selectively breed chimps? We're just going to put a human brain in one and call it a day. The world is going to be basically unrecognizable in < 30 years from genetics research. Humans are special because our brain is incredibly complex even vs. the next smartest species. An order of a magnitude greater- if I had to guess it seems plausible somewhere in that gap is a threshold value of neurons or neuron density that gives rise to 'free will' (or pseudo-free will, whatever you want to call it). Perhaps some sort of feedback model where reaching one point makes it easier to reach the next.
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Dec 5, 2014 21:35
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disheveled posted:Personhood is for humans and I believe it fundamentally needs to be that way. You need to be that strict about that definition because the entire point is to protect human rights for humans who can't protect themselves, like the mentally handicapped. When you begin including non-human species, you dilute and confuse the definition, you inevitably end up with a tiered system, and a likely result is that you fail to protect humans as you should. I am aware that there are legal scholars who suggest that we can create a tiered system which will be functional and not a total loving disaster of untold proportions, but I am, uh, a bit pessimistic about that. I believe it's far more likely to hurt disabled humans than to help non-human primates — you turn a human being into a monkey in the eyes of the legal system, not the other way around. im also very worried about an outer limits premise
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Dec 5, 2014 21:39
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DarkCrawler posted:Koko the gorilla understood approximately 1000 signs and 2000 english words. No understanding of grammar or symbolic speech. Somewhere around the level of an older toddler? Even a dog can understand that much, under the right conditions and with the right "teaching" methods. Unsurprisingly, there's usually a lot of questions raised about methodology and such when someone starts making claims about animal intelligence, since a lot of them turn out to be flawed, because of poor experimental controls or because animals can act and think in fundamentally different ways than we expect. It's very difficult to avoid issues like the Clever Hans effect, and people don't always apply proper scientific rigor to experiments on the animal they've been teaching and training for decades. Smudgie Buggler posted:Yes, but does that make them not-people? I think generally we'd be pretty loathe to say a baby isn't a person. And if you are willing to say that, you simply invite the question of at what age a human becomes a person, which in turn invites a ridiculous Sorites paradox. The question here isn't moral person hood, but legal personhood, which is unrelated to species. I think it's pretty self-evident that apes don't qualify for that - they don't have the ability to exercise civil rights, obey human social responsibilities, or understand even the concept of either of those. Just as children don't get full, unrestricted human or legal rights, and the severely mentally ill sometimes don't as well (though that is an incredibly delicate subject for historical reasons), apes can't seriously claim them either.
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Dec 5, 2014 22:25
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If the animal could talk and express a wish to be allowed out that could be different. But there was Koko's ability to learn sign language, and touch screen devices are quite intuitive...
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Dec 5, 2014 22:39
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What if an ape is now posting in this very thread from its ipad??
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Dec 5, 2014 23:26
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mobby_6kl posted:What if an ape is now posting in this very thread from its ipad?? Someone would have to buy that ape an account! How would it get a credit card?
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Dec 5, 2014 23:30
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McDowell posted:Someone would have to buy that ape an account! How would it get a credit card? If a dog like Santos L. Halper can get a credit card, then it's clearly not evidence of personhood.
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Dec 5, 2014 23:36
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Who What Now posted:^^^^^^ Interestingly, it seems possible that they would NOT understand "retrieve block from box left-of blue". There's some research that suggests that concepts like expressing and understanding locations relative to landmarks ("left-of-[category]/right-of-[category]", as opposed to purely spatial landmarks like "short wall/long walk") is tied to the symbolic/linguistic reasoning that, so far as we know, is still unique to Humanity. In particular, humans perform no better than rats at locating items with respect to landmarks (a blue wall) when they are asked to "verbally shadow" speech, effectively tying up the linguistic center of the brain.
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Dec 5, 2014 23:41
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Ethiser posted:There are very clear delineations between categories of organisms. That is why Taxonomy exists. Humans are special compared to every other known life form because we are the dominant animal on the planet so for better or worse we get to decide things. No, taxonomy is a system we have created for understanding the relationship between organisms. These "very clear delineations" do not exist outside of a constructed intellectual framework. Humans are "special" only in the sense that we have the most complex brain, just like mantis shrimp are special because they have the most complex eyes. "Dominant" doesn't mean anything...what are you basing dominance on? Population, environmental impact, etc. Main Paineframe posted:Just as children don't get full, unrestricted human or legal rights, and the severely mentally ill sometimes don't as well (though that is an incredibly delicate subject for historical reasons), apes can't seriously claim them either. But the people arguing for personhood aren't arguing they should get unrestricted legal rights. Like someone said earlier, there's a confusion in this thread between the legal and philosophical definitions of personhood.
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Dec 6, 2014 00:31
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DarkCrawler posted:I think you can already have legal protection even if you can't be held legally responsible for your actions. Children, mentally handicapped, etc. on the other hand people also have a legal duty to stop and restrict them from doing criminal actions. Harder in the case of dolphins who get up to some pretty sick poo poo actually. It's a pretty difficult question - should be intervene in inter-chimpanzee wars and the like? You know what? "I want to save an animal I like more from an animal like less", while understandable, is ridiculous when put into practice. If you do it enough, then go and enjoy your ecosystem full of cute fuzzy animals that may or may not be capable of suffering in meaningful ways while (now lacking predators to kill them dead in horrible painful ways) turning the whole place into an overexploited barren shithole only slightly slower than the average Asia Pulp & Paper operation ca.1990. Oops, that means they'll suffer again, so better manage every loving aspect of the ecosystem yourself, turning it into an open air zoo. Moralising about ~nature~ and how its constituent parts are worthy of moral consideration is what I've been hearing for all my loving life from uneducated dumb shits who would sooner let an entire habitat get bulldozed than allow the terrible terrible practice of letting people catch some specimens and feel good about it in their local conservation club. Also idiots who think all hunting should be banned but winter feeding continued (think of the poor starving deer  ) while deer populations are so ridiculously large they disrupt forest seedling recruitment enough to let natural forest regeneration be defined by the characteristic of "trees here are not tasty".Please think of nature as a series of interlocking mechanisms we don't yet fully understand first and as a collection of cute intelligent feeling animals a distant second, and don't join the well intentioned but undereducated idiots who make a mockery of actual conservation. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Dec 6, 2014 |
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Dec 6, 2014 00:46
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 11:39 |
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tbp posted:Gorillas are the best animal on earth. Gentle and intelligent if they were allowed to live unthreatened in their big salad bowl worlds they would do it. They're ftw, and to kill and hurt them is among the most evil things that I can think of due to their goodness of heart. Miltank posted:I would like to pay money for some well prepared bush meat in a sanitary western restaurant. I'm gonna quote this post the next time somebody calls d&d a "hive mind"
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Dec 6, 2014 01:33
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