Denial of Basic Liberty Rights for Great Apes Immoral

Denial of Basic Liberty Rights for Great Apes Immoral

Roger Fouts, Professor of Psychology; and Distinguished Professor of Research at Central Washington University. 2004 “APES, DARWINIAN CONTINUITY, AND THE LAW”. Animal Law. 10 Animal L. 99

According to the Cartesian worldview, the mind is idealized for both political and theological reasons. Man's domination of the less fortunate defectives is justified, and he is given a direct line to God through the Rational Soul-Mind that is unique to him. The defectives were seen as godless or ignored by God. With regard to the origin of language, Sarles bluntly makes this point when he states: "By setting man as unique because of his mind, it (language) idealizes the normal use of language and sets up a group of defective (or animal-like) humans, e.g. retarded persons, deaf persons, people who speak differently from the majority. The problem is implicitly, perhaps necessarily, racist."

One only has to look at the history of Western Civilization to see how this view has been used to justify everything from slavery in all its forms (e.g. the domination and oppression of women and the exploitation of children) to genocides committed against peoples such as the Jews, the Gypsies, or the Armenians. Western Civilization, which claims to be ruled by the Rational Mind, has yet to meet a people who lived in harmony with nature it did not destroy on contact, and our civilization continues to do so. Just as we have used our "special nature" to justify the exploitation of members of our own species, we have used it as well to exploit and destroy our fellow organic beings, whether they are free-living or captive chimpanzees, cows, rats, or trees.
UNEQUAL TREATMENT OF APES BASED ON THEIR SPECIES MEMBERSHIP IS UNJUST

Ingmar Persson, professor of philosophy, Lund University, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 190

So far I have talked about (intraspecies) equality between humans, but it should be plain that they type of considerations adduced could be used to vindicate interspecies equality as well. An individual’s belonging to a certain species is obviously not a result of his or her own doings; it is—given the customary criterion of species membership—something genetically fixed. Hence, a “speciesism” that proposes to treat, for example, chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans worse than humans simply because they are chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans would be unjust.
EXCLUSION OF GREAT APES FROM COMMUNITY OF EQUALS IMMORAL

Gary L. Francione, Professor of Law, Rutgers University, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 253

Moreover, the great apes possess these characteristics in substantially similar ways. That is, there is a high degree of similarity among the great apes in terms of mental capabilities and emotional life – characteristics which, for most of us, are central to the notion of “personhood”. And it is which, for most of us, are central to the notion of “personhood”. And it is in this respect that exclusion of any great ape from the community of equals must be viewed as being arbitrary and irrational, and not merely morally unjustifiable.
IRRATIONAL TO EXCLUDE GREAT APES FROM THE COMMUNITY OF EQUALS

Gary L. Francione, Professor of Law, Rutgers University, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 254

In this sense, the argument for including great apes within the scope of our moral concern is a most powerful one. The argument does not require the inclusion of all sentient beings within the scope of our moral concern as persons, but only requires that we include those beings who are so substantially similar to human beings that their exclusion would be completely irrational—as irrational as creating a classification of human beings based on hair coloring.

Denial of Basic Liberty Rights for Great Apes Immoral

Steven M. Wise, Animal rights attorney and professor Vermont Law School, 2002, Drawing the Line: science and the case for animal rights, p. 24

Since Linnaeus invented the system of biological classification we use today, humans have assigned themselves to their own family, Hominidae, the taxonomic classification just above “genus,” Homo, and “species” sapiens. We stuck even our closest cousins, the chimpanzees and bonobos, into a separate family. Ethologists Lesley Rogers and Gisela Kaplan point out that some scientists have suggested that at least some apes join us in Hominidae. If they did, “we would have reason to extend to the other apes some, if not all, of the rights that we presently afford humans.” But what reason would that be? Why should species, genus, and family be relevant to the assignment of legal rights? Shouldn’t it be what they are, not who they are that counts? To avoid speciesism and still justify depriving every nonhuman animal of rights, we must identity some objective, rational, legitimate and nonarbitrary quality possessed by every Homo sapiens, but possessed by no nonhuman, that entitles all of us, but none of them, to basic liberty rights. I shouldn’t search too long because this quality does not exist. In this chapter, I identify one quality, practical autonomy, that is sufficient to entitle any being of any species to liberty rights.

Legal “Personhood” Key to According Apes Rights

Gary L. Francione, Professor of Law, Rutgers University, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 251-2

Steven M. Wise, Animal rights attorney and professor Vermont Law School, 2002, Drawing the Line: science and the case for animal rights, p. 21

Generally the law divides the physical universe into persons and things. Things are objects over which a person exercises a legal right. Roscoe Pound called legal persons “the unit of the legal order.” A button, for example, buys nothing; the dollar does. For all of Western human history, nonhuman animals have been buttons in the legal system; so were human slaves and women and children.

Those who write about persons and things may struggle to distinguish them. One of the most prominent legal scholars ever to write, John Austin, defined things as “such permanent objects, not being persons, as are sensible or perceptible through the senses.” Not helpful. Human slaves, “like cattle…are things and the object of rights, not persons and the subjects of them.”

Daniel Defoe wrote:

Nature has left this tincture in the blood,

That all men would be tyrants if they could.

Steven M. Wise, Professor Animal Rights Law at the Harvard Law School, 2000, “Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals” Questia p. 4

This book demands legal personhood for chimpanzees and bonobos. Legal personhood establishes one's legal right to be "recognized as a potential bearer of legal rights." ⁶ That is why the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the American Convention on Human Rights nearly identically state that "[e]veryone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law." ⁷ Intended to prevent a recurrence of one of the worst excesses of Nazi law, this guarantee is "often deemed to be rather trivial and self-evident" ⁸ because no state today denies legal personhood to human beings. But its importance cannot be overemphasized. Without legal personhood, one is invisible to civil law. One has no civil rights. One might as well be dead.