Nature Is Becoming a Person
foreignpolicy.com
foreignpolicy.com
Then of course it falls to humans to determine what the best interests of these "persons" are, and to actually pursue those interests, and to judge whether those humans acting on behalf of these "persons" are actually acting in good faith (and what do we do if they aren't?).
Seems to me this "personhood" concept mainly muddies the waters (so to speak) and it would be simpler to pursue conservation ends without it.
Saying they are "responsible" for those things is like saying that a river is responsible for flowing or the Earth is responsible for rotating.
It is not the duty of plants to photosynthesize. It's just something they do. It is important to distinguish these two concepts, because if you equate them, then for example it is the duty of Exxon to destroy the environment. And this whole discussion presumes that humans and collections of humans like Exxon actually have a duty to not destroy the environment.
Well, this is a true statement. There is a meme "100 companies are responsible for climate change" which implies the companies could change their ways and customers don't have to do anything, but it's not true; we keep them around by buying oil and then we burn it.
The only way it could be different would if they could make carbon-neutral synfuels but it doesn't seem like this is happening.
However, it's not the whole extent. For example Exxon knowing about the CO2 greenhouse effect in 1982 and keeping quiet about that knowledge is problematic behavior that is not excused by customers' desire to buy fossil fuels IMHO.
I'm not wedded to the Exxon example. If you prefer, substitute any company that willfully breaks environmental protection laws to increase profits.
In America, most people cannot buy groceries without having access to a car. Car ownership is not required de jure, but it required de facto because of a lack of alternatives. America used to have transportation choice. Anywhere where there was transportation diversity, car, tire, oil companies bought out public transit and shut down the operations. On April 1974, San Francisco mayor and antitrust attorney Joseph Alioto testified that "General Motors and the automobile industry generally exhibit a kind of monopoly evil", adding that GM "has carried on a deliberate concerted action with the oil companies and tire companies...for the purpose of destroying a vital form of competition; namely, electric rapid transit [0].
Oil (and other) companies stimulate demand for their products. When consequences occur, the modus operandi of corporations is to shift blame to their customers. The concept of personal carbon footprints are the result of a PR campaign by British Petroleum [1].
I think the reason 100 companies is a meme is because it resonates. It feels right, but the counter arguments are convenient, easy. It resonates because it hints at phenomena that we can't see directly, but have tremendous influence on our lives.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...
I think in Carol Sanford's talks on living systems, the unique contribution a living system has for the ecosystem it lives within makes it non-displaceble.
Whether that should be recognized in our legal system, and something that helps humans participate in the ecology ... I don't know. The idea of legal personhood, at least, acknowledges that a living system is its own whole (if we are not just using it as a legal fiction), and it seems to me a stretch to say that a river "wants" legal representation. That sounds like the kind of stuff pre-modern tribal shamans do. That's not necessarily a bad thing in my book, but I don't know if our modern society is ready for that.
On the other hand, it could work as a balance to corporations having legal personhood.
smack a leaf with the back of my hand
No, those are not about responsibility. Is a river responsible for someone drowning in it?
I can be a socially amenable person without a legal status. We’d still police and service the usual.
The story of “I did this…” is entirely bullshit these days. 5% hunt still. It’s all modern logistics. Why the redundant finance network? How many distributed ledgers do we need?
Even in paper form, the value of currency is coupled to abstract belief in a national identity.
Of course infants and intellectually incapable adults are limited persons in the legal sense: they have fewer duties, but also fewer options. For example, they won't be accepted to a pilot school.
No it doesn't. All we need to do is to acknowledge that non-humans are not lesser than us, and that our most important responsibility as humans is to not abuse our mental and technological advantages.
But we have to be honest that we possess those advantages, and that we have special status as the only species that has responsibilities. In that sense non-humans are indeed lesser than us.
the problem with legal persons is that we hold them to the same standard as a natural person but their ability to do damage far exceeds anything a natural person can do. terrible decisions are being made by groups that do not reflect the individual. Many crimes are committed by legal persons are only punishable by losing trust from shareholders (lying to investors is much easier to get away with for legal than for natural persons - e.g. they're not crimes for legal persons in the same sense), a natural person would often go to jail for similar actions. Tobacco industry or oil industry would have no executives because they'd all have be doing time. the Sacklers would be hanging from a tree, and Elon Musk would be have to pay taxes.
> Seems to me this "personhood" concept mainly muddies the waters
there is nothing wrong with designating whole regions as off limits to humans. Ban any form of tourism or commercial exploitation etc in parts of the world is the only option IMHO.
I doubt it. Look at corporate personhood and how it applies to Citizens United, being able to sue and tax a corporation, etc. Also look at how conservation protections have been put in place over the years compared to corporate protections. Treating corporations as a "person" opened the doors for a lot of simpler legal tools.
I agree with your thought, but not sure how to make the responsibility part fit in.
As personhood is legally expanded it only follows that other consequences of it will change as well. If it's traditional for personhood to stipulate responsibilities but personhood is too good of a defense for these assets, then I'd bet the responsibilities will shift into a different classification. We already have similar splits between personhood and citizenship.
"Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology."
Adorno, T. W., and Max Horkheimer. [1947] 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
It didn't help this monkey with his selfie though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
And out of interest, the Illinois Attorney General essentially ruled that I did not fit the meaning of the word "person" under the law because I was a pretrial detainee being held at a county jail, and the rights I was fighting for (workers' comp) only applied to a "person", not to me.
It’s only fair that this be extended to animate, and perhaps inanimate, objects as well.
As I understand it: it works mainly by changing the legal standing. Right now, nobody can sue for destruction of habitat because they would have to prove firstly how they are personally affected by said habitat. By using Natural Personhood as proxy, anyone can sue, using the Natural Person to provide standing.
If I run over you in my car, I go to prison, not the car. Yet if a corporation kills you, the person “driving” isn’t punished, it’s the company that pays the fine.
And for some reason it’s the company that has free speech rights. No river has those.
How does the concept of personhood provide anything beyond or different from passing a law that protects a river?
It does make sense. Using "personhood" in this way has been the status quo for half a dozen other types of entities for going on generations now. Your complaints here strike me as similar to complaining about the use of "they" for the genderless out of a "but it's plural!!!"
If there is a trust for the river, then some human or humans are responsible for making decisions for the trust. So we are talking about an organization of humans that are working to protect the river, not the river itself personified. The organization can sue. The organization can own a bank account. The organization can be awarded damages, provided they have somehow acquired rights to the river. The river cannot do these things.
This is an important distinction because making decisions involves responsibility. If you treat the river as a person in itself, that would mean that the river can be blamed or held responsible, which is nonsense. To do so would hide the responsibility of the real humans who are making decisions. In fact, the organization is responsible, and the humans who run it are responsible for their decisions.
The river has two banks already! *Zing!*
In and of itself a policy giving legal standing to the environment seem really promising — and no doubt in certain instances, that's probably the case. But we should be careful to distinguish between policy nuances and what tradeoffs may be at play.
Some will say this is a 'conspiracy' site despite all the sourced connecting quotes, and legal outcomes, related to these vehicles. https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/10/investigative-reports/w...
It's happening in drips and drabs with domesticated animals anyway.