Planet Debate 2011 September/October l-d release Animal Rights
Respecting Liberty Rights of Great Apes Key to Breaking the Species Barrier
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Respecting Liberty Rights of Great Apes Key to Breaking the Species BarrierTHINKING ABOUT THE PERSONHOOD OF GREAT APES IS A WAY TO INTERROGATE THE WALL BETWEEN HUMANS AND NONHUMANS Steven M. Wise, animal rights attorney and law professor, 2003, The Animal Ethics Reader, eds. Armstrong & Botzler, p. 540 Recall that the abomination of human slavery was finally abolished in the West little more than 100 years ago. It continues in a few countries to this day. The first thinking about the justices of the legal thinghood of nonhuman animals occurred just as slavery was flickering in the West. To date, it has resulted mostly in the enactment of pathetically inadequate anticruelty statutes. But as the scientific evidence of the true natures of such nonhuman animals as chimpanzees continues to mount, that thinking will be its undoing. Because to think about the legal thinghood of such creatures as the great apes will be finally to condemn such a notion.
Bernard E. Rollin, professor of philosophy, Colorado State University, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 215-6 These, then, are some of the basic reasons why the great apes are plausible candidates for actualizing as fully as possible the emerging ethic. There are few animals so suited, both in rational and emotional terms, for fostering the widespread agreement essential to granting them “human” rights in the context of our ethico-legal system. The question which remains then, is how this can most expeditiously be accomplished.
Paola Cavalieri & Peter Singer, Editor Edica & Animali and Professor of Bioethics @ Princeton, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 309 Nevertheless, it might be said that in focusing on beings as richly endowed as the great apes we are setting too high a standard for admission to the community of equals, and in so doing we could preclude, or make more difficult, any further progress for animals whose endowments are less like our own. No standard, however, can be fixed forever. “The notion of equality is a tool for rectifying injustices…As is often necessary for reform, it works on a limited scale.” Reformers can only start from a given situation, and work from there; once they have made some gains, their next starting-point will be a little further advanced, and when they are strong enough they can bring pressure to bear from that point.
Bernard E. Rollin, professor of philosophy, Colorado State University, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 213 In the fact of these Human considerations, it is manifest that the great apes, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orang-utans, are probably the most plausible animals through which to nurture, articulate, express and solidify the emerging ethic we have described. This is true for a variety of significant reasons. One feature of the great apes which makes them a natural locus for the emerging ethic is the extraordinary degree of fascination and, far more important, empathy, which they inspire in humans—the public response to the work of Goodall and Fossey alone attests to this. This empathy can be found in unlikely places. Respecting Liberty Rights of Great Apes Key to Breaking the Species BarrierEXTENDING RIGHTS TO GREAT APES IS A GOOD WAY TO START THE PROCESS OF ANIMAL LIBERATION Richard Posner, Federal Circuit Judge, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 52 That is the process Wise envisages for the animal rights movement, although the end point is less clear. We have a robust conception of human rights that we apply even to people who by reason of retardation or other mental disability cannot enforce their own rights but need a guardian to do it for them. The evolution of human rights law has involved not only expanding the number of rights but also expanding the number of rights holders, notably by adding women and minorities. We also have a long history of legal protections for animals which recognize their sentience, their emotional capacity, and their capacity to suffer pain; and these protections have been growing too. Wise wants to merge these legal streams by showing that the apes that are most like us genetically are also very much like us in their mentation, which exceeds that of human infants and profoundly retarded people. They are enough like us, he argues, to be in the direct path of rights expansion. He finds no principled difference, so far as rights deserving is concerned, between the least mentally able people and the most mentally able animals, who overlap them; or at least he finds too little difference to justify interrupting, at the gateway to the animal kingdom, the expansive rights trend that he has discerned. The law’s traditional dichotimization of humans and animals is a vestige of bad science and of a hierarchizing tendency, which puts humans over animals just as it put free men over slaves. Wise does not say how many other animal species besides chimpanzees and bonobos he would like to see entitled but makes clear that he regards entitling those two species as a milestone, not an end of the road.
Bernard E. Rollin, professor of philosophy, Colorado State University, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 217 But it is well known that fundamental legislative change is excruciatingly slow, with that sluggishness being directly proportional to the revolutionary nature of the moral change underlying the law. Thus legislative conferral of rights for animals is a Sisyphean challenge. So long as powerful vested interests oppose the change, it can become enmired indefinitely, unless public opinion can be galvanized on its behalf. This can, in my view, best be accomplished by directing current law towards the enfranchisement of animals. Such a task is of course a formidable one, since extant law basically reflects the traditional social ethic for animals. None the less, I believe it can be accomplished, specifically in the case of great apes.
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