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WMain00 posted:Because a newborn baby will grow up to become an adult and fulfill said legal rights. An ape cannot do the same thing. Even the most intelligent chimpanzee isn't able to match against human intelligence. not in all cases, yet babies who grow up to become adults that can't fulfill said legal rights still have personhood.
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Dec 5, 2014 13:23
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tbp posted:It's a bit of a weird curve though. Remove humans from it and the great apes look like, to the rest of the animal kingdom, what we look like when we are included. They are vastly more intelligent than most beings on earth. plus, how accurate is the curve? when i talk to other scientists, they are frequently surprised that certain animals (such as crows) are able to observe human behavior and adapt themselves to live alongside it. a surprising number of them also find it unbelievable that crows and other birds are capable of constructing tools. i think the public is mired in a mindset of animals being barely lucid entities for the most part, with the exception of monkeys who are perceived as barely lucid with a capacity for mimicry.
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Dec 5, 2014 13:32
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to illustrate just how poo poo our understanding of animal behavior is, we're just now discovering that multiple species aside from humans laugh http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15880045
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Dec 5, 2014 13:56
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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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