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DrSunshine posted:Yeah, it's kind of a complicated issue -- that's why I think it's interesting and worthy of discussion (and even debate)! While I feel like I'm in favor of treating highly intelligent apes like chimpanzees, or dolphins and orcas (see the film Blackfish) as a "special class of person", it probably would open the door to a huge number of legal loopholes and just nonsensical things. The idea of having "tiers of personhood", with, say a chimp being on a rung somewhere around a pre-speech toddler or a severely mentally retarded person, would introduce a big headache with trying to classify different types of animals (and possibly even people!) based on their proximity to some kind of "ideally cognizant" person. This would be a challenge. On the other hand I think it would be relatively simple to free from captivity those animals which we deemed sufficiently intelligent to understand and bemoan their own imprisonment. That, I think, would be a fantastic first step.
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Dec 5, 2014 07:29
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say no to scurvy posted:I think a dog's right to personhood ≥ an ape's. Dogs are civilized. Yes apes are more intelligent (and we flatter ourselves about our unique intelligence) but a person is a social title; no creature has made more strides in civility (and hey, look at that, legal duty) than dogs. By this metric dogs have a greater right to personhood than most people.
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Dec 5, 2014 11:02
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