Should elephants have legal personhood? An upcoming case will decide | Hacker News Reader

Should elephants have legal personhood? An upcoming case will decide

theatlantic.com

7 pointssmallerfish8 comments

It comes down to who gets to be their guardians and "speak for them to the Law" and we have recent highly covered cases showing how bad we are at that when the "incompetent" being protected is a human being.

These worst examples generally revolve around the victim having a significant amount of money, which the "guardian" wishes to use for their own purposes under the color of law. Thus supplying the resources to create a justification to keep them under guardianship. Unless there is an elephant that somehow gets a windfall to their own name, the setup for moral hazard seems a lot smaller.

the worst examples receive little publicity and involve what i think most people reading here would consider trivial amounts of money and property.

The publicized examples involve money.

Do you care to reference specific examples? By your general comment, I had assumed you were referencing Spears and the occasional elder abuse article that pops up on HN. And I'm just saying that in the case of of an elephant with no money, they're a lot less attractive target for that type of hostile fiduciary.

Furthermore, it doesn't seem like the article mentions guardianship at all. In fact as it stands it would seem that elephants in general already have guardians - whomever can assert a property right over them. The question is whether an elephant itself should be recognized as having its own perspective. In this way, this case would seem to be more about reforming the current guardianship of elephants to increase their agency, rather than reducing it as you're making out.

And yeah to your general point, the courts are imperfect and seemingly terrible when we look at their worst abuses. But that seems somewhat orthogonal to the current question. If we get to the point where say some billionaires are abusing the ability to legally represent an elephant (to further their own interests while harming that elephant), then we can focus on that specific injustice.

Spears, yes; and Stan Lee, and... the list goes on. I dont want to comment on the evidence of abuse among the small time everyday "power of attorney" guardianship ive seen, I wish i had not seen it.

If we give elephants sub-human agency; do other animals get it too? Are they still "property"? do some humans become less than human? There's non-small questions here that can be re-examined and debated; but I fear there's going to be just a slide into a new ethics without ever evaluating the merits of either the old or new.

It might seem counterintuitive, but think of the way that many people react to fictional violence against a human, versus fictional violence against a dog.

I think charismatic megafauna might benefit even more from this effect.

What do you mean?

People often seem to care more about charismatic, cute animals, whether a dog or an elephant [0], than they do humans.

I suspect that this would change the calculus of the likelihood that a bad actor would be the representative of elephant-persons. While bad actors would likely be attracted to the role, I think there'd be greatly increased scrutiny of both the selection process and the role's activities due to elephantine charisma and the uniqueness of the situation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charismatic_megafauna

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