Respecting Liberty Rights of Great Apes Key to Breaking the Species Barrier

Respecting Liberty Rights of Great Apes Key to Breaking the Species Barrier

Steven M. Wise, Animal rights attorney and professor Vermont Law School, 2002, Drawing the Line: science and the case for animal rights, p. 33-4

I have been criticized for arguing in Rattling the Cage that practical autonomy, not just the ability to suffer, entitles one to dignity rights. One animal protection lawyer wrote that “if one accepts the philosophies of Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer, then an animal’s ability to feel pain and suffer, and not its ability to count or use tools, should be the measuring point in extending legal personhood.” Law Professor Cass Sunstein wrote in The New York Times Book Review that he was unsure why I spent so much space making the scientifically controversial argument that chimpanzees and bonobos are autonomous: “Would cruelty toward them be justified if it turned out that (as some scientists content) chimpanzees do not really understand American Sign Language? Why isn’t capacity to suffer a sufficient ground for legal rights of some kind—for dogs, cats, horses, chimpanzees, bonobos, or for that matter cognitively impaired human beings?” A subsequent letter to the editor of the Book Review damned my argument as “morally flawed” and insisted that “suffering, not intelligence must be the only consideration”; hadn’t Bentham said, “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but Can they suffer?”

If I were Chief Judge of the Universe, I might make the simpler capacity to suffer, rather than practical autonomy, sufficient for personhood and dignitary rights. For why should even a nonautonomous being bee forced to suffer? But the capacity to suffer appears irrelevant to common-law judges in their consideration of who is entitled to basic rights. What is at least sufficient, is practical autonomy. This may be anathema to disciples of Bentham and Singer. I may not like it much myself. But philosophers argue moral rights; judges decide legal rights. Ad so I present a legal, and not a philosophical, argument for the dignity-rights of nonhuman animals.

Daniel A. Dombrowski, 1997, Babies and Beasts: the argument from marginal cases, p. 146

Steve F. Sapontzis, Professor of philosophy, California State University, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 276

We humans have social instincts: we tend to divide up the world into “us” and “them” and to feel much more strongly obligated to those whom we consider kin. So, to the extent that we can bring people to recognize that nonhuman great apes are members of our biological “family” and can thereby bring people to extend their fellow-feelings to embrace these extended family members, we are more likely to secure for nonhuman great apes the protection of their interests against human exploitation that they morally deserve and desperately need. In this way there may be a practical, political pride of place for nonhuman great apes – similar to that for companion animals, who are members of our socially extended families—even though ultimately, without reference to human instincts and propensities, there is theoretically no obvious pride of place for them, or for any other feeling species.

Respecting Liberty Rights of Great Apes Key to Breaking the Species Barrier

Alex Kirby, Environmental Correspondent 1999. “Apes in line for legal rights” BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/277031.stm

Dr Goodall adds: "One has to make a start to break the arrogant perception that most people have that we are totally different."

Many GAP supporters accept that argument, not as a criticism, but as the way forward in what Dr Goodall calls "extending the circle of compassion, first of all to our closest living relatives".

If you deny rights to apes, they argue, then logically you should withhold them from mentally-disabled human beings.
APES ARE A LIVING BRIDGE TO BREAK DOWN SPECIES BARRIERS

Jane Goodhall, World Renowned Expert on Chimpanzees, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 14

It is all a little humbling, for these cognitive abilities used to be considered unique to humans: we are not, after all, quite as different from the rest of the animal kingdom as we used to think. The line dividing “man” from “beast” has become increasingly blurred. The chimpanzees, and the other great apes, form a living bridge between “us” and “them,” and this knowledge forces us to re-evaluate our relationship with the rest of the animal kingdom, particularly with the great apes.
MORAL PROGRESS MOVES IN GRADUAL STEPS TO EXPAND UPON WHAT SOCIETY ALREADY ACCEPTS

Bernard E. Rollin, professor of philosophy, Colorado State University, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 208

This Socratic notion can be extrapolated well beyond its roots in Platonism. In essence, it embodies the insight that moral progress cannot develop out of nothing, but can only build upon what is already there. In other words, the most rational and efficacious way to develop moral ideas in individuals and societies is to show them that the ideas in question are implicit consequences of ideas they already accept as veridicial. In other words, I can get others to accept my ideas by showing them that these are in fact their ideas, or at least are inevitable logical deductions from ideas they themselves take for granted.
FOCUSING ON THE CAPACITY TO THINK PROVIDES FOUNDATION FOR AN APPROPRIATE LINE

Cass Sunstein, Law Professor, University of Chicago, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 12-3