Orangutan with Human Rights Begins New Life in Florida
bbc.com
bbc.com
The time for animals of this cognitive and social level to be granted special protected rights and respect seems long overdue.
It’s time to open the blinders.
If it were truly human level rights bestiality laws would be unconstitutional in that context for one. Orangutans would be allowed to vote (only age, citizenship, and possible felon status are valid qualifiers and not mental competency), and we would arrest orangutans for committing crimes against organutans and allow them to face their accusers in court. To be found incompetent to stand trial would require special casing for every last incident.
Deluding the meaning of what a person is or what is not doesn’t look like a good idea in the long run.
This statement you're making today might be constructed has hate-speech toward non-human people in the future.
Or is this a person without the full breadth of human rights?
It's not enough to say 'legally a person,' you must say 'person' without any qualification whatsoever.
> Or is this a person without the full breadth of human rights?
Rights are for peoples or persons, not humans.
Orangutan is granted rights, and as a result is moved to a jurisdiction where the rights do not apply.
Sounds like a fun place to work
I think the Old Testament has interesting things to say on this topic: "Everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea are under your authority. "
In a lot of ways Judaism and what it evolved into is the unreligion religion. Events in it, like the plagues of Egypt, are digs at the asinine nature of contemporary customs. E.g. the frogs were a plague because the frogs were sacred and could not be killed. In general the Abrahamic God doesn't want you fettering your wealth away on complicated rituals.
In the West, you can usually see a split between people who view animals largely as property and those that don't. The latter concern me, because although I can oppose wanton cruelty -- when it comes down to it, there are people, and not people. And if I need to get rid of property because I can't maintain it, I should be able to do so.
This is a sentient creature, and - leaving aside the clear ethical questions that raises - considering our not always entirely inspirational stewardship of the planet and the creatures on it, I question your support for consigning it all to the cold classification of "property".
They're appealing to emotion by (re)stating that bad things can happen to nonpersons and that the nonpersons have some capacity to feel bad about those things. Which is true and not really disputed.
But the counterargument of the relative importance isn't being addressed. Why should we have laws on this?
As an extreme example, if someone kills puppies for fun they're probably not a great person. At the same time I do not know of a good legal framework to handle this. Relying on people thinking to themselves "that guy kills puppies for fun and may not be a great person" seems the more robust solution. Even then, what is fun? People selectively breeding dogs sometimes kill litters. If you keep people from killing puppies (for potentially good reasons) you have in a roundabout way made certain animal husbandry illegal.
One problematic reply I think is:
>We should fix both immediate problems and the fundamental ethics issues that perpetuate an exploitative mindset. Animal rights are part of that.
Until we have a really good test for animal intelligence and some tractable way to map that to utility I think this is seriously misguided. At the end of the day the wants of a human supersede the wants of an orangutan, even if only by force. Do I think there is much utility in how this orangutan was treated? Not really. But am I allowed to exploit the orangutan? Yes, to the same extent I have a right to life.