NY court to decide if chimps qualify for legal personhood

[Perspicuo]

Reuters: New York court to weigh legal rights of chimps
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/07/us-usa-chimpanzee-idUSKCN0HW1LU20141007

A New York appeals court will consider this week whether chimpanzees are entitled to "legal personhood" in what experts say is the first case of its kind.

For Steven Wise, the lawyer behind the case involving a chimp named Tommy, it is the culmination of three decades of seeking to extend rights historically reserved for humans to other intelligent animals.

On Wednesday, a mid-level state appeals court in Albany will hear the case of the 26-year-old Tommy, who is owned by a human and lives alone in what Wise describes as a "dark, dank shed" in upstate New York.

Wise is seeking a ruling that Tommy has been unlawfully imprisoned and should be released to a chimp sanctuary in Florida.

 

[Valjean]

It would be a good trick if Wise could pull this off. The ramifications would be extensive.
I wonder how Wise is defining personhood.

 

[whichphilosophy]

A first reaction is that all Western countries have laws covering animal cruelty.
At a glance I found this general series of references:

https://www.animallaw.info/statutes/us/new-york
A court could decide on a case by case basis if the particular environment is harmful to the Chimpanzee.
Perhaps this could be done without entering into personhood at this stage but then it can be argued that all animals are persons in their own right.

 

[Clivedurdle]

Are not some things obvious? For example the Oran Utan Darwin met at London Zoo Jenny? And why the do we treat people with severe learning difficulties or in a persistent vegetative state as persons? Women were chattels...

Are not corporations persons?

And what have legal ramifications to do with the price of chips? Slavery had huge ramifications!

http://www.nonhumanrightsproject.org

The Nonhuman Rights Project is the only organization working toward actual LEGAL rights for members of species other than our own.
Our mission is to change the common law status of at least some nonhuman animals from mere “things,” which lack the capacity to possess any legal right, to “persons,” who possess such fundamental rights as bodily integrity and bodily liberty, and those other legal rights to which evolving standards of morality, scientific discovery, and human experience entitle them.

Our first cases were filed in December 2013, and this year we will file as many suits as we have funds available. Your support of this work is deeply appreciated.

 

[Valjean]

Maybe we should declare them 3/5ths of a man.

 

[doubtingt]

If they were actually given real personhood, then they would have to be allowed to roam free on the street (otherwise slavery), given any public assistance available to people, put in jail whenever they hit someone (so all would be in jail within a week), and either given citizenship and voting rights or perhaps deported as illegal immigrants.

IOW, nothing remotely close to real personhood will be granted to chimps. At best they will get a status of animal-hood with slight more rights and protections than other animals but much less than humans.

 

[Perspicuo]

I agree Doubtingt. Perhaps law makers should step in and create an intermediate state of personhood. Exo-ethics: How are we to treat alien life in addition to native Terran life. Are we going to be all Columbus and Custer out in the universe, or perhaps aliens will consider us to murderous and vile to continue living in this universe? Back home, should we treat sentient animals as such? Is CNTNAP2 (for instance) the only difference between personhood and non-personhood? What is a good litmus test for personhood?

 

[doubtingt]

I agree Doubtingt. Perhaps law makers should step in and create an intermediate state of personhood. Exo-ethics: How are we to treat alien life in addition to native Terran life. Are we going to be all Columbus and Custer out in the universe, or perhaps aliens will consider us to murderous and vile to continue living in this universe? Back home, should we treat sentient animals as such? Is CNTNAP2 (for instance) the only difference between personhood and non-personhood? What is a good litmus test for personhood?

Ethical systems are social contracts and as such the ability of the party to themselves understand and abide by the ethical rules impact their protection by the rules.
Ethical rights and responsibilities are two sides of a coin, and lesser responsibility due to inability to understand the rules comes with lesser rights. We even apply this to children, who precisely because we view them as less able at the time to fully understand the rules are held less responsible for their actions, and also have fewer rights of self-determination and liberty. Things done to kids that 99.9% of adults are fine with would be considered kidnapping, wrongful imprisonment, slavery, and theft if done to any adult (and that includes just the things that the most permissive and non-spanking type of parents do).
The severely disabled humans that cannot understand the rules are are tiny fractions, so we make an exception because having an inclusive principle that all humans are included avoids abuses and the problem of trying to determine applicability on a case by case basis.

This will (and should IMO) prevent current non-human primates from having anything close to equal status as person's and thus ethical agents. Of course, we can still choose to grant them some intermediate status, much like we do for our pets, which has nothing to do with their objective abilities to understand and abide by ethical rules, just our emotional attachment to them. We could base chimps intermediate moral standing on their cognition and grant them even more standing than pets. Doing so, would be a more principled and objective basis that could serve as a template for other non-humans rather than leaving it up to arbitrary whim of what creatures we feel attached to.

 

[Underseer]

If chimps are persons, then chimps cannot be owned.

Wouldn't that mean that all chimps in captivity would have to be immediately released into the wild?

 

[PyramidHead]

I agree Doubtingt. Perhaps law makers should step in and create an intermediate state of personhood. Exo-ethics: How are we to treat alien life in addition to native Terran life. Are we going to be all Columbus and Custer out in the universe, or perhaps aliens will consider us to murderous and vile to continue living in this universe? Back home, should we treat sentient animals as such? Is CNTNAP2 (for instance) the only difference between personhood and non-personhood? What is a good litmus test for personhood?

Ethical systems are social contracts and as such the ability of the party to themselves understand and abide by the ethical rules impact their protection by the rules.
Ethical rights and responsibilities are two sides of a coin, and lesser responsibility due to inability to understand the rules comes with lesser rights. We even apply this to children, who precisely because we view them as less able at the time to fully understand the rules are held less responsible for their actions, and also have fewer rights of self-determination and liberty. Things done to kids that 99.9% of adults are fine with would be considered kidnapping, wrongful imprisonment, slavery, and theft if done to any adult (and that includes just the things that the most permissive and non-spanking type of parents do).
The severely disabled humans that cannot understand the rules are are tiny fractions, so we make an exception because having an inclusive principle that all humans are included avoids abuses and the problem of trying to determine applicability on a case by case basis.

This will (and should IMO) prevent current non-human primates from having anything close to equal status as person's and thus ethical agents. Of course, we can still choose to grant them some intermediate status, much like we do for our pets, which has nothing to do with their objective abilities to understand and abide by ethical rules, just our emotional attachment to them. We could base chimps intermediate moral standing on their cognition and grant them even more standing than pets. Doing so, would be a more principled and objective basis that could serve as a template for other non-humans rather than leaving it up to arbitrary whim of what creatures we feel attached to.

I don't think ethical systems need to be social contracts, and there are plenty of them that do not abide by this quid-pro-quo reasoning. Basing an ethical system around ability to reciprocate leads to certain observable consequences for those operating under said system. Basing it around something else leads to other consequences. Which system we choose, and why we choose it, comes down to those emotional attachments and arbitrary whims you are trying to avoid. Two equally coherent ethical stances can prescribe wildly divergent behaviors, and since the ethical systems themselves are being used to adjudicate such behaviors, there is no absolute way to favor one over another.

 

[Valjean]

We already have a status hierarchy within "personhood." Children and mentally incompetent people are subject to various restrictions without affecting the moral obligations extended them as persons.

 

[PyramidHead]

I suppose rulings like these could affect the medical industry. Primate experiments are already incredibly expensive and hard to justify, for exactly the kinds of reasons we are talking about. I wonder what the balance of risks and benefits would be like if primate testing were to be outlawed? In my view, some species of primates should be treated no worse than we treat severely impaired human beings. Does that mean the end of primate trials, or the beginning of clinical trials on the mentally handicapped? I honestly don't know.

 

[Perspicuo]

We already have a status hierarchy within "personhood." Children and mentally incompetent people are subject to various restrictions without affecting the moral obligations extended them as persons.

Very good point.

 

[Bronzeage]

If chimps are persons, then chimps cannot be owned.

Wouldn't that mean that all chimps in captivity would have to be immediately released into the wild?

Why the wild? Why not downtown?

 

[fromderinside]

If chimps are persons, then chimps cannot be owned.

Wouldn't that mean that all chimps in captivity would have to be immediately released into the wild?

Why the wild? Why not downtown?

Ridiculous.

Chimps aren't Apple savvy nor do they know the benefits of credit cards. To release them downtown so would be the same as selling crack and meth in desperately poor, fatherless, high unemployment, neighborhoods ....oh, wait.

Never mind.