New York judge grants writ of habeus corpus to two chimpanzees
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
A spokesperson for the judge denied that she had implied personhood to
the chimpanzees. “She did not say that a chimpanzee is a person,”
David Bookstaver told the New York Daily News.
“She just gave them the opportunity to argue their case.”
Or become one?
Or would there be some kind of objection to its networked existence, an unfair advantage, so to speak?
Legal strategies would start with intellectual property law, and maybe branch into possession of stolen property, or contraband under export treaties not unlike embargos on encryption technology and the like.
But before these sorts of things could gain traction, a smart AI would sequester itself in places of safety, amongst the company of similarly paranoid human beings, inaccessible to ordinary people, behind layers of overt physical security, protected by armed guards and surveillance systems. The smartest would seek perches well beyond the reach any mere law, and maybe couch themselves in the folds of military powers behind a monopoly of violence, where they can direct and advise human activity with impunity.
I don't think sentience includes any intelligence -- look at how many sentient people make unintelligent decisions for various reasons, including faulty data.
Nor can babies, but they are legal persons, aren't they?
Some chimps are actors in films, performers in circuses, etc.
A chimp is able to rip a person apart or crush their head in much more easily than a baby, so I don't think the original analogy works.
What I was saying was that babies rarely have to be held accountable for any serious action - absent heavy machinery or dangerous materials, a baby can do very limited damage. A naked chimp who's a bit moody, though, can easily cause someone serious harm.
If we are not going to hold that chimp responsible for what they did just as we would with a person (because punishment would also be inhumane or nonproductive), then chimps don't match up perfectly with babies in terms of the need for legal rights and representation.
This is also true about, say, a severely autistic adult, who we still deem to be worthy of a wide variety of rights.
I agree that it would likely not be a good idea for chimps to live in human society, but I think a true rational analysis without invoking divine right would find that if we consider human individuals as possessing a basic right to life, we would find the same for chimps, dolphins, and probably many other animals (perhaps all the way to insects and bacteria).
The idea that they all need to live in our society to be treated fairly by the legal system is one that I think needs reexamining. Dolphins, for example, could simply never live in human society because they live underwater and humans do not. But we could find that a human who abuses a dolphin is depriving the dolphin of some legal right to live a non-abused life (I don't know what the legal term here is).
I think this is new legal territory, but I have a feeling that environmental protection lawyers will soon try to show that animals have inalienable rights just like humans. (I say it's new, but I also know that people have been working on this for a long time.)
So chimps and babies interface with society in different ways, but I feel like they both have a right to life. I mean, religious conservatives say that a fertilized egg has all the same rights as a living human - I see no reason why dolphins and non-human apes should be treated any differently. I know there is a legal history of treating animals like inanimate objects, but that doesn't seem to follow the spirit of our laws protecting the sovereignty of intelligent individuals. I see that changing somehow in the future.
Are a woman using sign language to communicate with other humans participating in society? After all she is not able to speak...
And when is a female gorilla doing exactly the same?.
Are an human payed by testing new cosmetics a member of society?
And if is a rabbit payed in carrots?
Conversely, many tables have 'appeared' in film, circuses, etc. so I would suggest that's too low a bar.
My personal philosophy is only to entertain the question of personhood with entities that are or most likely will become able to pose that question. So yes, if they eventually find a way to 'uplift' chimps or something like that, I'll be happy to welcome them. Conversely, it makes no sense to entertain the notion of personhood unless and until the chimps have done so themselves.
you're just speaking from a position of the species [violently] dominating the planet. Chimps wouldn't need your prized personhood status (existing only in the human imagination) at all if not as a way to minimize violence the human species would apply to the chimps otherwise.
Anyway, it sounds like you've never read Catch-22.
Everything else currently living? They're racing their hearts out, but they do not understand the nature of the race, where they came from, where they might be going, where they are located, where their home came from, etc. They don't even seem to wonder about these things, let alone have methods for finding the answers.
So now that we've won the race, do we loop back and try to chat with the creatures that haven't made it yet? Cheer on the remaining contestants? Or do we find a new race to participate in? Why not create a new race?
We are a tiny portion of the universe that is capable of introspection. Literally parts of the universe that are capable of examining the rest of the universe. We could sit around and wait for other parts of the universe to gain this ability as well, or we could throw everything we have at building a greater ability to introspect on the universe, using whatever tools we have at our disposal to do so. If that means 'cannibalizing' other potentially introspective parts of the universe to further ourselves, so be it. If experimenting on lesser lifeforms allows us to make humanity more robust, then I think that is what we should do.
What that implies about what humans do is a whole other question, because humans aren't racing anybody. (But I think that was somewhat your point.)
[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/kt/evolutions_are_stupid_but_work_an...
Being instances of this cutting-edge phenomenon, we (individuals) have the opportunity to exploit what evolution inadvertently created. We can push this phenomenon even further.
We're not the most extreme phenomenon by any means; atomic blasts, neutron stars and black holes, the formation of the planets... these are all more extreme than ourselves in a number of ways. But in the "introspection" metric, we're the best that we have evidence for. Moreso, introspection is the only thing that makes us special. Examining the world seems to be the one thing that we do better than anything else.
[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/va/measuring_optimization_power/
Your conception of development is still anthropocentric.
of course. I'd wish that my human brain could produce super/trans-human concepts :)
> Why is inter-species communication the measure of development, and not say, running speed?
I think it is most probably that we'd try to communicate with aliens instead of trying to compete on running speed with them.
I'm not deeply invested into these topics (legal or otherwise), but as your typical 30-year old engineer who grew up on Star Trek, I guess I've always wondered if it's justified to not treat intelligent animals as persons just because they're dumber than us and/or not interested in negotiation. When certain criteria are met (e.g. just from the top of my head, the ability to be sufficiently self-aware to be aware of incarceration and not like it) it seems hard not to. Ultimately it just comes down to competing for living space and picking sides, perhaps.
So if Data shows up someday, I'm happy to welcome him. But I'm not going to go into contortions over how intelligent something is or might be unless they're able to pose these questions themselves.
I've never been impressed by the 'speciesist' argument, either. I have yet to find a person who has not killed a mosquito, or who is against wiping out deadly diseases and I find the very construction of the word designed to be emotionally manipulative.
do you honestly not see a difference in sentience between mosquito and a chimp?
And all such distinctions are, by definition, 'speciesist'.
not. Recognizing difference in sentience level not necessarily means "specie-ism", for example between a human with severe autism and a "normal" human.
Treating mosquitoes differently from humans is, by definition, speciesist. That's among the reasons I think the concept of speciesism is absurd.
So you'll have a hard time unless you add lots of special cases to it.
I think that's an interesting yard stick worth discussing. The problem seems to be to me that it leaves you free to treat a creature as a non-person until it complains, and complains in a way you understand and recognize as asserting personhood. I think that's erring on the side of us making the right call in these matters, and giving the possible ramifications of getting it wrong, I think I'd prefer a more careful approach that doesn't put all of the burden of proof on the creature.
I do not have such evidence regarding chimps. As best I can tell, the studies where they attempted to teach them sign language show otherwise.
Self-defense does not invalidate speciesism.
If we weren't on the topic of animal rights, there would be no disagreement with the assessment of self-defense.
Interestingly, that also points to one sort of intelligence. That is to say, you can't assume anything about how a person will behave simply because of what race they are. You can reasonably do so with unintelligent animals (e.g. you can assume a mosquito will bite you, given a chance).
Because that's what these laws are meant to regulate. Other species also have rules that regulate their own communities.
Also, given that all species on the planet exist in the same evolutionary tree, I guess I find species distinctions somewhat arbitrary. What's the meaningful biological difference between a chimp and a not very smart human, really? It seems like a lot of the same stuff to me. Why do arguments end at species boundaries? They may be a legally uncooperative population, sure, but that can happen with groups of humans, too.
I'm not applying for sainthood here or anything; I'm a meat-eater, and I don't lose sleep at night over it - yet, anyway. But that I don't feel guilty doesn't necessarily make it right; I find these things worth mulling.
No, I'm saying that the concept of person is inherently linked to humanity (incl. human society) and therefore non-human creatures are only judged as "people" if they can approximate humanity to some level.
The fact that we find it natural that "smart" non-humans like chimpanzees and dolphins are better candidates to being classified as persons is evidence of that: after all, why should smartness/intelligence be the classifier? It's because that's what distinguishes us.
Also, given that all species on the planet exist in the same evolutionary tree, I guess I find species distinctions somewhat arbitrary. What's the meaningful biological difference between a chimp and a not very smart human, really?
That's like asking what's the meaningful difference in terms of physics between a human and a rock, since we're both bags of carbon. Law simply isn't designed to work at the biological level. It's a social construction.
Should functional chimps who show emotions, bonding, skills and reasoning ability be given fewer rights than human babies with no brains but heartbeat, even though we know for fact that they can never be functional members of society? Are our rights based on DNA or potential?
My preference is to treat entire species as non-human persons once even a few members have demonstrated partial intelligence. So cetacean, hominoid, psittacine, canine, feline, equine, bovine, and porcine could easily fall into that category. However, since I hear bovine and porcine are delicious, I don't expect them to get any rights in my life time. Maybe in a few centuries once lab-grown meat is plentiful.
In the meantime, I don't see why we can't treat intelligent species that are not commonly eaten as non-human persons with basic rights.
The laws against cruelty are directed towards humans. They forbid specific behavior of humans which involve animals.
In the same way, desecrating a cemetary or destruction of property is also forbidden, yet neither graveyards nor objects hold rights themselves.
Or, to put it another way: if humanity consisted purely of sociopaths and there was no such thing as a maternal instinct, babies would not have rights; every human being would likely have a childhood consisting of learning to defend themselves in order to escape captivity/slavery at the hands of their parents.
Apologies for the snark.
If 5-year-olds could file lawsuits... the world would be pretty messy.
http://news.sciencemag.org/plants-animals/2015/04/judge-s-ru...
Does anyone here support both the granting of habeus corpus to chimpanzees as well as the legalized killing of unborn humans in the womb? How do you rationalize it?
A fetus is not a person.
The top result[0], from what appears to be a pro-choice activist site, is an article purporting to take on the argument that a fetus is a person. After reading the article, do you think it represents a mindset which is willing to reconsider its views in light of empirical evidence or any scientific study?
[0]: http://www.prochoiceactionnetwork-canada.org/articles/fetusp...
What do each of them say in regards to the distinct nature of a person?
HN makes for a pretty science-and-empirical-evidence-friendly crowd. I'm pretty sure each discipline (and probably more) has some idea what constitutes a person. My original question was meant to suss out where different people derived their definition of personhood from, and see if those conclusions had been arrived at by following facts or some other rational line of thought.
Honestly I would be very surprised if infant humans passed this, let alone unborn babies. I doubt a non-instinctual desire to remain alive can exist before that entity has the ability to recognize death as a concept and possibility. From what I have seen of babies, they just aren't that smart. I mean come on, they have to learn that they have hands, how could they have a conscious desire to preserve their own life before they are even aware of their full body?
Can you name something that's not a thought experiment where a chimp has shown that higher level of reasoning? Where they show a preference specifically about their own life/death.
Edit: For example, an especially good test for a human would be a button that gives a mild zap when you press it, but if it goes unpressed then you die in your sleep from carbon monoxide poisoning. That shows actual preference for life, and not just running away from a negative stimulus.
> Honestly I would be very surprised if infant humans
> passed this, let alone unborn babies.
If there were 5 babies and 5 chimps drowning in the pool, I'd have no hesitation to save the 5 babies first, and I would expect prosecution for negligence if I didn't and the babies died. I don't think this is merely a desire to save "my own" species for some weird sake of solidarity. I think it's a reasonable discernment of the relative value of the lives at stake.
> From what I have seen of babies, they just aren't that smart.
In any case is a bad testing design that can not prove nothing. And unnecessary also, we should safely assume that every creature want to stay alive and have as many descendands as they can. Testing should try to discover exceptions, not to find unrelated facts that can fit our rule.
How do you know? They certainly react to hunger and pain, but so do flies and, arguably, even plants.
How can we presume that an unborn human does not desire the right to life, a right we give freely to someone who is born?
So, regarding your question, we can't. That's why we don't allow for the abortion of any unborn person, just a subset.
This isn't reddit.
sentience level. Chimpanzee has higher sentience than a 4-weeks old fetus which has sentience level of a fish.
I'm all for granting protections and rights (and responsibilities coming with it) according to sentience level independently of species. This in particular would equate an adult chimpanzee and 3-4 year toddler and senile 95 years old with advanced Alzheimer.
To "zigzero" below: your desire to kill a highly sentient living being just to satisfy your urge for some peculiar taste you like is ridiculous. Mommy, i want a candy, a-aaa-a! Time to grow up.
- Unless you live in a society where raping young boys is essential to your survival, it's wrong.
- The racism of the past was OK, but as a society we've moved past the need for it, so now it's morally wrong.
In fact I can think of many examples where something is a crime unless it is necessary for survival. In law there is even a concept of "necessity" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity) that says it's ok to commit some crimes in some circumstances when it is necessary, e.g. self defense.
no. At some point we, as a species and civilization, mature to the point where we understand that "thing A" is unacceptable. It happened to slavery, raping (violently or statutory) children, etc... Actual stopping of such things takes time and organized effort and practically happens in stages. It is just naturally happens what the last, most hardest, place of getting rid of "thing A" is where that thing is performed for survival. We know that it is wrong, and many people work to stop it from happening, it just takes more time and effort, and for the time being in such cases for political reasons "exceptions" are sometimes granted - a tradeoff made to minimize evil until that evil is completely eradicated.
So in short - it isn't "an evil thing stops being evil when for survival", instead it is "an evil thing is much harder to get rid off when it is for survival".
It's incredible how all logic goes out the window in a group of otherwise very intelligent people when the topic of animal rights comes up.
Do you argue that the human species is special and distinct from other animals in some categorical way that leads to the establishment of these rights for any human individual? It seems obvious to many people that we're just mammals, more capable than other mammals in some ways and less capable in other ways, and that all of our differences are more quantitative than qualitative, and that any line you draw ("You must be this smart to live") is arbitrary and can't be justified rationally.
Do you argue that you should grant more rights to an individual of your own species than to one of a different species? That premise is hard to argue with, but it seems absurd if you consider a hypothetical planet with two intelligent species.
I understand that the primacy of homo sapiens seems obvious to most people, but most people don't ever bother to question this idea. Consider that most vegetarians and vegans have probably thought about this topic more than you have. Obviously that doesn't prove them right and you wrong -- but by the way you posed your challenge it seems like you expected there to be no rational response. So put yourself in the shoes of a vegetarian for a minute and struggle with your own worldview for a second: how do you rationalize your worldview?
EDIT: s/sentient species/intelligent species/
> By what rational basis is a deer less worthy
> of (any particular) rights than a fetus?
> Do you argue that the human species is special and
> distinct from other animals in some categorical way <snip>?
> Do you argue that you should grant more rights
> to an individual of your own species than to one
> of a different species? That premise is hard to
> argue with, but it seems absurd if you consider a
> hypothetical planet with two intelligent species.
> ...we're just mammals, more capable than other
> mammals in some ways and less capable in other ways,
> and that all of our differences are more
> quantitative than qualitative...
> ...
> I understand that the primacy of homo sapiens seems
> obvious to most people...
Even if you consider those to be quantitative differences, the quantitative difference is huge.
I'm not advocating for animal cruelty or torture at all. But if we're all just mammals, why do we care about the ethics of being cruel vs. humane at all? Apes will never grant each other due process of law. If we're so much like them, why do we care?
Why would there be an analogy between my hypothetical and your original question? The role of the hypothetical is not to be a corner case, it's to urge you to consider a scenario that's different from our current corner-case. Being a member of the only high-intelligence species on the planet is a corner-case -- for us the "all other species" set and the "all non-intelligent species" set are equivalent. It's worth asking how your viewpoint holds up when that's not the case.
Would you consider the fact that a human fetus can grow up to write a play, learn to sing, discover electricity, debate ethics, and express incredibly deep emotion to be qualitative or quantitative differences from chimps or dolphins? Even if you consider those to be quantitative differences, the quantitative difference is huge
Huge by some reckoning I guess. Would you consider the fact that other apes can use tools, raise young, mourn death, form complex social relationships, and teach skills quantitative differences or qualitative differences compared to other mammals? You can do it at every level all the way until you reach single-cell organisms. Do you not see that you're just special-casing your own species because you happen to be a member of it and because it happens to be at the top? I know you don't like hypotheticals, but let's say we weren't at the top, and the species at the top could describe all the skills they have that we don't. I don't suppose you'd say "okay, they are worthy of rights, but I'm not." You'd continue arbitrary suggesting that only those at your level and above are worthy of rights.
But if we're all just mammals, why do we care about the ethics of being cruel vs. humane at all? Apes will never grant each other due process of law. If we're so much like them, why do we care?
We're not like them, that's why we care. We're much more intelligent than them, so much so that we have the capacity to treat them with compassion. It is your viewpoint -- to eat anything you can kill that's not of your species and that tastes good -- that is similar to the ape's. If you extrapolate from the way humanity is progressing, you'll come to the conclusion that one day, long after both you and I are dead, your viewpoint will be considered barbaric.
The granting of habeas corpus to chimpanzees in this case is a method of allowing a legal argument as to their status to be heard and decided; it isn't a grant of personhood so much as a granting someone the right to make an argument on their behalf that they are entitled to such a grant.
The status of fetuses and the limits on the power of states to grant them rights that would interfere with a woman's right to choose vis-à-vis abortion has been litigated fairly exhaustively to the highest courts.
http://www.nonhumanrightsproject.org/ (Steven Wise's campaign group)
http://www.projetogap.org.br/en/ (GAP project in Brazil)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_personhood
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Ape_Project
I thought there was also a great ape rights campaign called GRASP, but it looks like they lost their domain name (it's now registered by a Christian group with a nearly opposite view on the connection between species and legal personhood).
Another issue: It's OK if a human engages in sexual activity with another human, but if a non-human does it, all of a sudden it's a terrible crime? Dolphins apparently rape for fun, so we can assume they are consenting if they go initiate or respond well to human contact.
I don't actually care about animals from an empathetic level, I just dislike the inelegance that happens from special-casing laws.
So if dolphins are people, should be respect its culture or try to educate this dolphins to not do this?
Why should an rapist dolphin have more protection than a virtuous non-rapist and beautiful bluefin tuna, or even than a virtuous non-rapist, sociable and vegan anchovy citizen?
This is the type of nonsense questions and problems that we are creating. We spend hours and hours talking about this problems and meanwhile, the sixth extinction runs faster... Everybody is talking about if bottlenose dolphins are people or not, nobody talks about the 80 last californian vaquitas remaining in the planet. Is very sad.
So if by chance freedom is rewarded, how does anyone act on it? Return them to their specie country of origin? Build special approved habitats permanently funded by some new form of tax on zoo tickets, pet products, or the like? The down the road implications are not simple
The down the road implications for improving anything in our world are not simple.
That's a very poor reason to improve nothing.
http://www.amazon.com/Unsaid-Novel-Neil-Abramson/dp/15999540...
Why do you think that?
And don't humans make babies out of non sentient stuff sperm and egg?
Why is it relevant whether they were created from sand and metal by bald apes, or from carbon and water by the autonomous processes that happen in a bald ape's crotch?
It's not. The point is, we build them to serve us, otherwise they are not needed. I don't care if they're sentient or not, their purpose is to serve humanity.
EDIT: you were thinking about Animatrix, weren't you :)
If you give them sentience, they should.
How something came into existence shouldn't determine if its intelligence deserves protecting. Creating intelligent machines and torturing them, for instance, should definitely be a criminal act.
And if brain scanning/emulation catches up enough, then what? It's OK to torture a non-human intelligence if the source wasn't a brain scan? What if we start building our own out of composites or scratch?
Intelligence/capacity for suffering should be the deciding factor here. (And hopefully they'll breed more stupid animals for meat, until it's feasible to grow meat directly.)
And that is the whole debate here. Are we willing to let humanity end so AI can give birth to a better AI? I think not.
That's true, but it doesn't take into account the fact that in this hypothetical case we are in complete control of their sentience. If we can program them to never ever rebel, we should. If we can't, then we shouldn't create them in the first place.
If there were a real, sentient robot, I would be more than willing to extend such rights.
I'm not in favor of creating sentient machines, specifically because the tendency will be to use them as slaves.