Nonhuman Rights

Ken Taylor
Should some nonhuman animals be legally regarded as persons?

John Perry
And should those animals be allowed to sue in court to protect their legal rights?

Ken Taylor
This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

John Perry
…except your intelligence. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from Cemex Auditorium on the Stanford campus.

John Perry
Our thinking originates a stone’s throw away from here at Philosophers Corner on the Main Quad. That’s where Ken and I teach philosophy.

Ken Taylor
Welcome, everyone, to Philosophy Talk. [applause]

Now, most philosophers believe that we humans have rights, because well, we’re persons. Now if it turns out that some non human animals are persons too, then it just follows is night does day that they should have rights—nonhuman rights.

John Perry
Wait a minute. What do you mean by person here? For most people, person means human beings. So it’s like contradictory.

Ken Taylor
Well, Descartes, for example, thought that to be a person meant to have an immaterial soul. And he thought that the soul is the seed of all thought and consciousness so a person is an ensouled human being.

John Perry
Yeah, Descartes thought a lot of things in particularly that non human animals lack these souls. And thus, we’re just fleshy automaton, with no thought or consciousness.

Ken Taylor
Well, if yes, we I think Descartes over estimated humans, and underestimated animals, frankly, because I don’t think there is a soul.

John Perry
I think you’re better off with John Locke. John Locke said that any creature with a conception of itself counts as a person. Whether it’s a parrot or whatever, according to him, a person is a thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection. So it considers itself as a self.

Ken Taylor
Well, I think that Locke’s got it much better. You know, one thing is, you don’t need a soul. To do that any creature with a half decent sized brain can consider itself as itself as locked puts it.

John Perry
Okay, decent size brains, but big deal. I mean, size wise, or any other reason to believe that some animals consider themselves as themselves?

Ken Taylor
Yeah, well just take the simple thing of pain. Obviously, animals feel pain, obviously, they hurt.

John Perry
Well, that’s not enough. I mean, if that’s all it takes to be a person that I would take worms would be people. Yes. Take a look at them. They ride around, I sure look like they’re feeling pain. You’re gonna give them rights?

Ken Taylor
No, maybe. But I’m actually thinking about more than just riding around. I’m thinking about animals that are capable of much more than, you know, simple aversive reactions. I’m thinking about the capacity, like to understand. And then to represent the infliction of pain, for example, as an infliction of harm upon the self as me, you’re hurting.

John Perry
Okay. But why? Why is that so important?

Ken Taylor
Well, because let’s just think about it. Think about the way humans respond to pain. We complain, I mean, we may threaten not just to hurt the perpetrator of the pain or hurt them back, but like to take them to court. And so now why do we do that? What’s behind that? That’s because we understand and represent the willful infliction of pain by the other. You’re inflicting pain on me as a violation of the self. And that’s what makes us persons.

John Perry
Have you got any evidence that animals can do that sort of thing? Has any animal ever lodged a complaint with you against another animal for violation of its own?

Ken Taylor
Well, take Koko the gorilla. Maybe she could lodge a complaint using American Sign Language. I mean, she was taught something like athousand different signs, John. African gray parrots, they were amazing. They can speak in whole sentences.

John Perry
So you think that what makes gorillas say and African Grey parrots persons, unlike say worms, is the capacity for language. Now, I think Locke might agree with you there. He thought very highly of talking parrots.

Ken Taylor
I know he did. And I think that’s part of it. I don’t think that’s all thing. I think there’s, there’s more than that going on. I mean, think about elephants. They have these really strong social bonds, complex relationships with one another. They grieve they actually grieve when their family members die, and they even seem to have morning rituals. So look, they can clearly do this thing that distinguishes persons from non persons, they can distinguish self from other and they can experience the loss of the other as the loss of something valuable to the self things matter to them. So yeah, they’re persons.

John Perry
Alright, so suppose I grant you that at least some non human animals have some of the hallmarks of genuine personhood. What follows from that?

Ken Taylor
Then the floodgates open John, then it follows that we ought to start treating these animals like the persons they are, and not just these things, we ought to recognize that they also have a right to life, liberty, security of person, I mean, the right to be free from fear of oppression and slavery, the right not to suffer cruel or degrading treatment. I mean, the floodgates open.

John Perry
Well, come on again, it took us civil war, to get started on recognizing the rights of African Americans and the process is incomplete. What do you think it’s gonna take to get the rights of chimps and orcas in Paris recognized?

Ken Taylor
Well, look, I met it’s gonna be a long slog. But as Confucius says, Even the longest journey begins with a single step.

John Perry
You’re sou learned. A good place to begin our journey towards deeper understanding is with our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Liza Veale, who takes a scientific look at the personhood of nonhuman animals. She files this report.

Liza Veale
Primatologist Frans de Waal tells a lot of adorable stories about the chimps he studies behaving altruistically.

Frans de Waal
At the field station, for example, we have a very old female. Her name is Penny, who can barely walk who has arthritis.

Liza Veale
When the other young females see or get up to go to the water spigot, they run ahead.

Bill
And they take a drink for her and they return to her and spit it in her mouth, so that she doesn’t need to walk that whole distance.

Liza Veale
Why does this kind of altruism seem a lot more heroic than, for example, the way an ant sacrifices itself for the colony? Is it because ants seem to be nearly obeying genetic reflexes, but the monkey seems to be making a choice?

Bedtime for Bonzo
I wonder if I could teach this monkey the difference between right and wrong.

Liza Veale
De Waal suggest that actually, social animals can’t help but be empathetic. It’s a primal instinct, and it doesn’t involve a lot of choice. It turns out the wall found that even having a sense of fairness might be innate to you can watch videos of his experiments. In one you see an adorable little chimp get himself a piece of cucumber by exchanging it for a rock. Then he watches his chimp friend do the same only in return receive a grape. The first chimp instantly knows he’s been ripped off, rages against the bars of his cage because anguished face to the sky as if petitioning the gods for mercy, and then proceeds to stage a hunger protest against the injustice by dutifully handing over rocks, just so he can take his cucumber pieces and throw them at the researcher. But de Waal goes on to say, eventually, both chimps get upset by the unfairness, not just the one that’s been shortchanged.

Bill
We have found that sometimes the one who gets the grape tries to equalize the things by refusing the grape till the partner also gets one. And we have now reached with chimpanzees, the point that their sense of fairness is much more evolved than in these monkeys, and is very similar to the human one.

Liza Veale
But monkeys don’t do things because they think they ought to—they do things because of emotions. De Waal says behaviors that seem to be enlightened or chosen or taught to us by our parents, like acts of empathy or ones that promote fairness within a group—they may just be reflexive, because emotions by definition are not chosen.

Antonio Damasio
Your mind is representing what has changed in your organism while you are in the emotion.

Liza Veale
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes an emotion as a non-conscious set of actions that play out in an organism. So let’s take the emotion fear. Imagine you’re driving on the highway and someone’s swerves in front of you. In a single instant…

Frans de Waal
You have your heart rate that goes up and you have the blood pressure that goes up and you have your hypothalamus spritzing cortisol.

Liza Veale
And automatically you swerve away. This is your prepackaged biology controlling you. None of it is chosen.

Frans de Waal
We have this program in us and we have it not just for fear, but we have it for sadness, anger, joy. We have it also for a variety of emotions that we call social emotions, for example, embarrassment, shame, contempt, compassion, admiration, pride, guilt. All of these exist as pre-packaged arrangements in the biology of your brain.

Liza Veale
Scientists keep finding more and more species whose behavior, like ours, is motivated and regulated by emotions, even ones that can’t physically emote—like snails. But we can’t read snails. There are plenty of animals that have the capacity to feel emotions that we don’t feel for: vermin and rodents and birds and crayfish. We humans mostly only intervene to protect the species that we empathize with. In that light, our behavior sounds kind of like the chimp in Fran de Wall his lab, and his solidarity protests tantrum over the great, great injustice. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Liza Veale.

John Perry
Thanks, Liza. That was fascinating. And in some odd way inspiring. I’m John Perry, along with my fellow philosopher at Stanford, Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from Cemex Auditorium on the Stanford campus.

Ken Taylor
And our guest today is a legal scholar. He’s the founder and president of the Nonhuman Rights Project. He’s author of a book called “Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals.” Please welcome to the Philosophy Talk stage, Steven Wise.

John Perry
Steve, you’re working as a lawyer fighting for the legal rights of animals? So how did that come about? How did you first get interested in this issue?

Steven Wise
Well, believe it or not, it was a philosopher, Peter Singer, wrote a book about how we treat non human animals. And I read that when I was a young lawyer, and I realized that we treated them terribly, we treated them terribly in vast numbers. And for me, most importantly, there didn’t seem to be anyone who was standing up for their interests. And so the reason I had become a lawyer is I’d come out of the anti war movement, maybe three or four wars back in Vietnam. And the reason I’d become a lawyer was because I was interested in issues of social justice and, and I thought that nowhere could have make a larger impact than trying to represent the interests of the nonhuman animals of the world. So that’s what I decided to do.

John Perry
Your organization is called the Nonhuman Rights Project. Why not just animal rights, that’s a familiar term. Why not just use that?

Steven Wise
Well, we’re animals. And so we didn’t want to confuse the rights of nonhumans. with humans. That’s the first reason. The second reason is that the idea of animal rights has been around for 20, 30, 40 years now. And people now tend to think of it as involving anyone who’s really doing anything to advance the interests of non human animals. And we as lawyers look at it in a technical way, we’re, we’re actually not looking to protect them, or we’re not looking out for their welfare, we’re trying to establish and then protect their rights. So we talk about the rights of non human animals, but the main the main rights that an animal rights is to be treated kindly and humanely. And I don’t know if those are rights or just things that humane humans do. But you’ve got something else in mind, we do. We are not interested in asking other human beings to treat non human animals humanely or nicely or non cruelly, we’re saying that the nonhuman animals themselves have the rights to be treated in certain ways.

John Perry
That’s a good distinction. I mean, if I were convinced that corporations are persons, right, I still wouldn’t treat them humanely. So an important distinction.

Ken Taylor
So wait a minute, though. So there are some animals you think that you can amount in argument in courts of law, under statute, the Constitution, common law, you can mount an argument in courts of law, that certain things that apply to human beings ought to apply to them to there’s a certain class of animals that you think you can do that with?

Steven Wise
We we look to see why the courts value non human animals, what kind of qualities do they value? So we we actually don’t sue under statute or sue under the Constitution, we still under the common law, but a lot of judges make. And so when we, when we’re going into into a state, we try to understand what are the values and principles that the judges in those states say that they hold, and then we fashioned our arguments around those so that we essentially come to them and say, You believe certain things, we agree that these certain things are true. And we’re telling you that art non human animals ought to have rights for the same reason.

Ken Taylor
We’re gonna have to dig into what those certain things are in our next segment. This is Philosophy Talk, coming to you from Cemex Auditorium on the Stanford campus. Our guest is founder and president of the Nonhuman Rights Project, Steven Wise.

John Perry
Coming up our next segment, should some non human animals be considered persons under the law? That’s our basic question. But what criteria would we use to determine non human personhood?

Ken Taylor
Nonhuman animals, nonhuman persons, and nonhuman rights—along with questions from our human, all too human audience, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Frans de Waal
This is what it sounds like when doves cry.

John Perry
Thanks to our musical guests, the Tiffany Austin Trio. This is Philosophy Talk. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Our guest is legal scholar, Steven Wise. And we’re thinking about nonhuman rights.

John Perry
Do you think of your dog or a cat as a person or your parrot? If you do, how does that affect the way you treat them? How would you treat non human animals that aren’t persons different from ones that are persons, you can join the discussion. And if you’re a gorilla that uses sign language, or a parrot that tweets, we will try to accommodate you.

Ken Taylor
So Steve, as I understand it, you think that certain animals, like chimps, elephants, orcas deserve to be considered not as non human animals, but non human persons, and they should be so considered in the eyes of the law. Now, there’s the legal notion of person, there’s the philosophical notion of person I’m going to start with, What do you mean by person? What are you getting at when you say, non human animals a person?

Steven Wise
Well, I’m not really getting at anything, what I’m, what I’m trying to get at is what the judges are getting at when they think of what a person is. And what a person is, is really a rights container. So in order to have a right, you have to be able to have the capacity to have a right to the capacity to hold a right. And that’s what a person is a person has the capacity to have a right.

Ken Taylor
So that’s what we try to do a little isn’t that and that’s a little empty. I mean, how do I know? How do I know? Okay, I look out there. I see. There’s chair, that’s not a rights container. It’s a bug container, but not a right container. I see lots of human beings. I think they’re all rights container. Right? My dog would come in here. I mean, I really love my dog, whether she’s a rights container, I don’t know what distinguishes a rights container from a non rights container.

Steven Wise
What judges say, distinguishes a rights container from a non rights container. We don’t come up with our own philosophical or jurisprudential ideas. Well, we try to understand is what what do the judges say, per se?

Ken Taylor
I’m the judge. I’m the judge convinced me that animal is the rights content.

Steven Wise
Okay, so I’d say, so what do you think a person is judge?

Ken Taylor
Where’s the sovereignty?

John Perry
And he says, I was just gonna ask you.

Steven Wise
Well, I’m glad you asked. So before we go in and have the conversation like that with a judge, we will study the law intensively for months or years, so that we already understand what that is. So for example, in the state of New York, we understand that an entity who was autonomous is supremely valued by the common law by the judges of the of the state of New York. And so we go to the court and say, we understand that you supremely value, autonomy. And so now we’re prepared to bring our client in front of you or a chimpanzee, and prove to you that she is also autonomous. And so you already tell us that you value supremely autonomy, she’s autonomous, her autonomy should also be valued, and she should be a person.

John Perry
Okay, so you can take the lawyer out of law school and over the business school, that’s about as far as we get around Stanford. But we don’t want to take the lawyer Lee perspective out of the lawyer but suspended a little we get the philosophical perspective, the judge decides this way or that way, would they be right? What is the person? Now let me suggest something. In psychology, there’s been but I think actually, Darwin was the first to come up with the idea of a mirror test. But Gallup not the pollster. But another Gallup had this idea that could animals look in a mirror, and with a little time to figure it out, realize that they’re looking at themselves, that would mean that they would get information about the object in the mirror. So you so you have a chimp in particular, they look in the mirror and you smeared some stuff on their head without them knowing it, and they see the stuff on the chimps head, and they rub it off. Now that shows, what does it show? Well, it’s showing that there’s some sense in which they realize they’re one of a group of which that’s another one and there’s commonalities. And so the limiting case of identity makes sense. I mean, now, it’s very controversial in psychology as everything is because how else would you get through ranse but still, it’s a kind of a common sense test and some birds pass it some birds don’t. Most of your apes, do primates we do mostly children don’t necessarily at the beginning, but there’s a clear stage. Is that the kind of thing that would cut any ice and court? Does it cut any ice with you?

Steven Wise
It cuts a lot of ice with me. As I tell my students, judges don’t care what I what cuts ice with me. What they want to know is what kind of legal arguments can we present to them that will persuade them? And so when we use the argument of autonomy, that we argued that autonomy is a sufficient condition for personhood, we begin by bringing in expert evidence from Jane Goodall and many other ape cognition experts from around the world. And we prove that they’re self conscious they they pass the test are talking about, and even we go further that they they have a theory of mind that they understand that not only do they have a mind, but that others have a mind.

John Perry
So they’re interpreting and predicting what their their con specifics do in terms of what must be some theoretical understanding of what goes on inside them in the sense in which I have a theory of your mind, right, I think my beliefs and desires.

Ken Taylor
There’s lots of scientific experiment and data to support. At least the thought that primates and other animals have very, they’re very much on the way to something like a human like conception of the self, they can pay. Duvall, who was on our roving philosophical reporter has all this stuff about strategic intelligence, and how they, how they can deceive each other and all that. But I’m a little bit confused about something. You say? Well, it’s not really what I think it’s not so much even what the science thinks. It’s what the law thinks, what the judge thinks. And if you look at these opinions, and you say, Judge, you seem to value autonomy, I’m gonna say, Okay, here’s an example of autonomy. So value this it in this chip, but as your question about the common law, or the constitutional law, or the lead statute, has it, has the law really thought this through? Or is it just a bunch of, you know, I don’t want to say half aid stuff, right. That’s a kind of collection of rough intuitions. I mean, I think the question of what is autonomy is really hard. With some of my colleagues in the flow department, they spend their whole careers trying to understand autonomy. It doesn’t sound like the law. And then I wonder if you’re just exploiting the the shallowness of the law as a tactical strategy.

John Perry
If he was a good lawyer, he’d better.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, no, I know. I’m wondering if there’s something deeply philosophical inside difficult steak, or just the half big notions of the law that aren’t really thought through?

Steven Wise
Well, let’s we want to get sued by the chimpanzees for malpractice. We, we, we we had better understand what’s going on and bring the fight to the judges. You know, when when we argue that autonomy, say in the state of New York right now is what we do argue is that it is a sufficient, but not a necessary condition for personhood. I mean, it gets way more complex. A the country of New Zealand in the last year has designated a National Park as a person, the Whanganui River as a person last month and Indian court held that the Ganges River was a person.

Ken Taylor
Isn’t that a reductio ad absurdum of the law and its concept of autonomy and person. That’s what I’m getting at that the law is built on this thin thing. And I admire you for exploiting the law. But I thought there was something deeper here. That is not just the thinly thought out motions of law. Look, the law lets corporations be persons. That’s the silly it shows you how how shallow the law is.

John Perry
Let me interject here add or pile on. That’s whatever I can feel it. I mean, something made you decide that you wanted to get the courts to do this thing, which you’re going to get him to do in whatever way it takes. But what happened to you that made you decide that’s what you wanted to do was that in some sense, you came to believe that animals are persons and if humans get rights, they should get some rights or certain rights to you came to believe that then you’ve got this other job of convincing people who believe that 70 years in prison for a little dope is not cruel and unusual punishment, that corporations are persons and god knows what else. Okay, I admire your taking on that. Thank Well, it’s a thankless task, you’ve got a huge round of applause. Frustrating tests, but what deep inside of you did you become convinced of.

Steven Wise
Yeah, right. I became convinced of the fact that many non human animals have can suffer terribly. They can live in social groups. They have all kinds of complex emotions. They can think about their lives, they can understand that they’ve had a past they understand that it’s them, they’re living in the present, they can understand that they have a future and they can plan for the future like chimpanzees. It’s clear can play for the future and, and putting them in prison for something that they didn’t do wrong, is just as bad and maybe worse than putting a human being in for something that he or she has done because they understand why they’re there. Chimpanzees don’t know why they’re there. elephants don’t know why they’re there. Orcas don’t know why they have to like rot in a little swimming pool and SeaWorld, they just don’t know they’re just there. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t suffer any more terribly than what a human being. And so our job is to alleviate that and get them back to where they are.

John Perry
You’re a person who deeply feels it sounds to me like a philosophically very well thought out and compelling version of a person’s that their persons, then there’s a job of convincing some guy that Bush appointed or to rule a certain way. And I admire you for that too.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about non human rights, with Steven Wise, in front of a live audience at Cemex auditorium at Stanford University. We got questions from that live audience. I’ll go back and forth from one side of the room to the other. Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Mike
Hello, I’m Mike from Santa Clara, in the course of humans, coming to understand that some animals need to be represented before the law. How is it decided? Which attorneys will represent those animals?

Ken Taylor
I think that’s an excellent question. Thank you for the question, Mike.

John Perry
They have to work without a fee, I assume.

Steven Wise
Ok so we, we decided that we would, one of the things that we do is we file a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of chimpanzees. And one of the reasons that we chose a writ of habeas corpus is that traditionally, there is no what Lori’s would call a standing problem that anyone who sees a person who’s being illegally detained against her will anyone can go in and make that complaint. So we say we’re going in and making complaint on behalf of that chimpanzee who’s being forced to spend his life in a cage.

Ken Taylor
Let him wait a minute standing problem. You said anyone who sees a person? Isn’t the issue of personhood at stake. I mean, for me, the issue of prisoners is not at stake. I’m a person, I’m being detained. Okay. There’s a chimpanzee, maybe it’s owned by somebody. Right? They have some standing under the law, I guess, if ownership of chimpanzees, and you say, but that’s a person, you can’t own a person. But isn’t that what’s at stake?

Steven Wise
Oh, that’s right. We go in and say I, you might think that that chimpanzee is your property, we’re saying, Oh, you’ve been making a terrible mistake, that chimpanzee is a person. And so we are now going to use a writ of habeas corpus to bring the question, am I right? Is she a person or you right, and she’s your property in front of the court?

John Perry
Okay, so we’ve got a dolphin, let’s say that’s been kept in captivity. And some people are protesting this and maybe suing the people who run the place and so forth on the grounds that this is cruel, they’re not happy, so forth and so on. But that’s not your take your take is they are a person. And there’s no right to imprison persons, unless they’ve found to have done something wrong by a court now, with the animals. You think our persons is there, this possibility of them doing something wrong so that they lose their right of freedom?

Steven Wise
I don’t think so. We would view a chimpanzee as having the autonomy to be able to make the decision should I be living in that cage is should I be living in the wild or no on an island with 25 other chimpanzees, but requiring a chimpanzee who is not one of us, you know, does not have our culture to to live according to our rules upon penalty of being imprisoned, we don’t think they have that sort of capacity. And so they would be like a human being who’s not competent. They aren’t competent to say, sue someone, like if I have a 15 year old child, even my 15 year old child is not competent to sue someone. So you have to have a parent or guardian sue someone and we’re the guardians for the chimpanzee. So you, you could not bring a criminal prosecution against them any more than you could say against a six year old child who carried a gun to school and shot someone.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Bill
I’m Bill from the farm. It’s encouraging. I’m trying to find to see that the monkey is on like some people know what justice is. But I’ve heard there’s also animal watchers have seen trips of monkeys traveling in their native habitat. And as they go past some delicious food off to the side of the trail, one of them notices it and he notices that the others don’t notice it. So unlike chickens who share he doesn’t share, and he comes back and gets destroyed himself. Would you have an opinion on what should be done about him?

Steven Wise
Yeah, that’s who they are. You know, they’re, they’re not you know, Socrates, Aristotle and Plato, they’re monkeys. And just by the way, most humans are not Socrates, Aristotle and Plato either. We’re just humans present companies. So that’s exactly which is which is what what he was saying. And chimpanzees do the same thing if there are studies showing that if a chimpanzee He knows that another chimpanzee is seeing certain foods and he’s a dominant chimpanzee, that the non dominant the the submissive will try to get the food. But if that chimpanzee can understand that the dominant chimpanzee cannot see that there’s food out there, the submissive woman go out and grab it. That’s that’s just, that’s just how we all are chimpanzees, monkeys and humans alike.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re thinking about nonhuman rights with Steve Wise, author of “Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals.”

John Perry
How can we change the way some nonhumans are treated? Under the law, where by treatment here we have, whose rights are being violated, which species should be considered person they have to pass the mirror test something else, dogs aren’t going to pass the mirror test because they just sniff and what does that mean about their rights?

Ken Taylor
We’re coming to you from Cemex Auditorium on the Stanford campus. We’ll take more question from our human audience when Philosophy Talk continues.

Tiffany Austin
And I think it’s what I want to be.

John Perry
Thanks to our live musical guests, the Tiffany Austin Trio. I’m John Perry. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. We’re thinking about nonhuman rights with Steven Wise, founder and president of the nonhuman rights project and we got questions from our live audience. Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Grergor
Hi, my name is Gregor from Los Altos. Imagine you were a dictator with absolute powers, which nonhumans would have rights and which rights what they have?

Ken Taylor
That’s a good question we were gonna ask you. So he said, just thanks, thanks.

Steven Wise
It’s really hard to know, I think what what I would say is that many non human animals, many, many species should be legal persons, and that they should have the capacity for rights. So we don’t have to fight about that. What we fight about is which rights are appropriate for them, or maybe none, maybe one, maybe 100. And so that means we bring in experts who studied them for years or decades, and so that we can understand, you know, who they are, what sort of minds they have, are they the kind of entities who ought to have the rights that lawyers and others aren’t claiming for them?

Ken Taylor
I want, I want to press you on something that you said toward the end of the last segment, how there are creatures to whom we can do moral wrong. But they can’t do more than wrong to us. They’re not responsible. I mean, one of the things are, our notion of personhood was about that’s what got John Locke going about prison, and he wanted to find where are the centers of moral responsibility there were prisons reside, right? But this notion of personhood that you apply to animals, is completely disconnected. It sounds like from moral responsibility.

Steven Wise
Well, chimpanzees, for example, are have a rule based society, they have a sense of morality within their within their right. Nobody asked them to be part of human culture and human society. And so it’s too much to say, we’re going to enslave you unless you can figure out how to follow all of our rules. So what the nonhuman Rights Project is saying they’re a person who we ought to recognize, at least for so called negative rights, immunity rights, that we should essentially just leave them alone to live their lives.

Ken Taylor
Like that’s a consequence. I wanted to get out, leave him alone to live their lives. So you know, I’m kind of a cosmopolitan internationalist score to do a kind of wide ranging human cooperation all stand equal before all a global moral community in which we’re all wrapped up. You’re not saying well, chimps to it as part of that global moral community, you’re saying they’re over there left alone by us like the alien other who should not like the Star Trek prime directive kind of thing? Do I have that right.

Steven Wise
I guess I think it’s actually actually quite close. They are as one person wrote, you know, they they are other nations, and that we leave chimpanzees alone to be chimpanzees and elephants alone to be elephants and birds alone to be birds.

John Perry
Maybe somebody will leave other nations alone.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

JC
Hi, I’m JC from Oakland, California. And I was wondering kind of along the same lines as we were talking, as you guys were talking just now, if I were to find myself in the same place as a nonhuman animal, they may not recognize my rights. that you’re talking about. So, should we recognize rights for someone who’s not recognizing rights for us? And if so, why?

Ken Taylor
What about that the fact that there’s never going to be a kind of reciprocal recognition between us and them?

Steven Wise
Well, that’s really a lot to ask of them. You know, we’re not saying that chimpanzees have the same complexity that we do. We don’t know whether they can recognize our rights, although we have hints of it. When I was in Africa, looking at chimpanzees, they didn’t attack me, they kind of left me alone, they understood that I was on their territory. Jane Goodall has talked about the fact that she has been charged by chimpanzees many times, even when her backs up against the cliff, but no one has ever harmed her in that way, nor have they ever harmed any other human being. And so I, I think, in their own ways, they are respecting us now, whether it’s because they think we have rights or not, I just don’t know.

Ken Taylor
So let me ask you, Steve, it sounds kind of paternalistic. Right. It sounds almost like back to Genesis, like, we have dominion over this. And we get to decide who has which rights and whatnot, instead of I mean, if you deny the possibility of like, moral community with them, in which we deliberate as equals together, how we’re going to live together, and who has what, right. It sounds very paternalistic to me. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. A good thing and necessary thing, but do you own up to this paternalism?

Steven Wise
No. Maybe we should extend like a veil of ignorance to so that when you’re trying to set up the ideal moral world, you don’t know whether you’re going to be human or not, and begin from there.

John Perry
Okay, that’s really interesting. Now, let me ask you an example. Okay, so in California, we have bears, we have mountains, full of woods and bears, and we go camping there. And I don’t know where bears are on the person of I, the bears I’ve known struck me as pretty intelligent, not up to the great apes. But you know, they know what they’re doing. They plan ahead, they make choices. Now, are we violating the rights of a bear that’s coming down and destroying the garbage cans and campgrounds, we don’t need to worry about the bear tearing someone apart, although they do do that under certain circumstances. But they never agreed to those rules. They never agreed to not go through garbage cans. So if we put that barrier in a cage just for a day to transport it away from the campgrounds, is that a case you think would be a violation of rights or should be considered by the court a violation of rights?

Steven Wise
So it’s not only a legal but a philosophical problem. It’s also an environmental problem, you know, you know, first we take away their habitats, so they’re forced to live, you know, cheek to jowl with us, even though they probably wouldn’t if they, they had their choice. And so then you’re inevitably going to have conflicts. And you know, what happens here? It’s happening in Africa all the time. What what happens when as the African population expands, and elephants begin to trample their crops or chimpanzees raised their crops, these, these are really serious problems that frankly, you know, we have created.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Duncan
Hi, my name is Duncan. You’ve talked about rights for chimpanzees and cetaceans. But what about the billions of animals in our factory farms? Are cows pigs and chickens, right bearing subjects? Should we all be vegans or vegetarians? Like where do you stand on that issue?

Steven Wise
Well, again, you know, where I stand on it doesn’t really matter. The question is, what sort of legal arguments can we make? And you know, right now, we’re at the beginning of this, we’re only a couple, three years into it. And the arguments that you’re setting forth now are the ones my opponents make of me. So we’re coming in and saying, This chimpanzee should not be in a cage, he should have a right to bodily Liberty that’s protected by writ of habeas corpus, and the other lawyer stands up and says, But Judge, if you do that, then we’re all gonna have to be vegans tomorrow. And so they use that argument to try to prevent me from taking the first step.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Michael
Hi, my name is Michael and I live in a little tiny village in the south of France. It’s pretty obvious that a doc or a snake or tuna fish doesn’t need our help. They’re autonomous. And to deny that, it seems to me is a colossal human arrogance. My question is, what other criteria the judges have besides autonomy to determine if something is a person?

Steven Wise
Judges use public policy? You know, 130 years ago and American judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the common law and he said that the life of the law is not logic, but his experience, which you might be experiencing tonight. And I know my my two co hosts are experience The fact that law is not logical, it comes from experience. And whether or not any entity whether it’s a river, a glacier, a chimpanzee, or a pig is going to be a person will be a matter of public policy and morality. And it’s something that judges have to try to figure that out, even though they’re not particularly educated, either in public policy or in morality.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, sir.

Chris
Thank you. My name is Chris. Um, I guess I have a question for the hosts who are questioning our, our guests. And when you talk about, you know, why should animals have rights and say, Well, what if we asked, Why should humans have rights? In particular, why should all humans have rights? And if we look at like distinctions between different groups of humans, versus humans and other animals, I think we’ll find the difference to be in amount rather than in kind.

Ken Taylor
This is a very complicated question I can we could spend hours talking about this complicated, but I mean, the foundation of the theory of human rights is complicated. But I think one of the things you’re getting at is a Peter Singer kind of line, he once argued and got a lot of trouble for this, that some humans, humans with severe dementia, for example, are less cognitively sophisticated than some animals. Right? And if rights are based on like, the degree of cognitive sophistication, then some animals have more moral standing than some humans. And you’re kind of hinting at that possibility. Because why do these let’s call them diminished humans have full human rights? And if the diminished human is equivalent to some animal, why doesn’t that animal have equal rights? That’s a complicated question. We could talk hours about that.

John Perry
But it’s a very good question. Because I mean, that’s how you get started. You say, Well, why do we Why do us white people have rights? That’s the first question you need to ask when you find you don’t have an explanation that works for us and doesn’t work for the African Americans, or the American Indians, then you’re on the road. So it’s a very good question that we don’t have time to consider.

Ken Taylor
That’s a, that’s a deeply philosophical question.

Steven Wise
Could I also add that one thing, that what we’ve been talking about so far is, what kind of a characteristic is is sufficient for a person right now, that that is an argument from Liberty. It’s a noncomparative rights argument. It’s not from equality, it’s from Liberty. Now, from my point of view, I think it’s terrific that even a human being who doesn’t have a brain at all is entitled to fundamental rights. And then we then say, well, as a matter of equality, there is something wrong with a human being who doesn’t even have a brain who has certain kinds of fundamental rights. But these chimpanzees or elephants, who have these immensely complex minds, wonderfully complex societies, live social lives, emotion, rich, rich emotionalized, to say that they’re going to be things while the human beings who don’t have any brains or persons. There’s something wrong with equality, and we think those humans should have rights, but then that means so should the other nonhumans.

Ken Taylor
Well, this is fascinating stuff. But you know, let’s forget it and sometime, and see if I’m gonna thank you for joining us. It’s been a tremendous conversation.

Steven Wise
Thank you very much.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been Steven Wise, founder and president of the Nonhuman Rights Project and author of “Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals. Now, this conversation continues at philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers, where our motto is Cogito ergo Blago, I think, therefore I blog, and you too can become a partner in that community just by visiting our website, philosophytalk.org.

John Perry
Now, here’s the guy fighting for every creature’s right to talk as fast as they want. It’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… At the risk of incurring Twitter shaming, or whatever passive aggressive punishment social media is doling out this week, I’ll confess I used to like elephants at the circus. I liked them lumbering around, with the bunting and spangles, and the shiny smiling women straddling their thick necks and waving. PETA, people for the ethical treatment of animals, told us that those elephants were actually miserable. They would picket the circus, which interfered with my enjoyment, but I would still get a thrill when the elephants knelt in a circle and the band struck a major chord. Last year the circus decided to drop elephants as part of the show, and this year, announced there wouldn’t be a show at all. The Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus, finally defunct after 146 years. And that’s all for the good, I guess. No more parading elephants, or bullfights, or bucking broncos, or lion taming. That’s fine. When I was a kid, big game hunters were heroes in movies. They’d fall in love with Ava Gardner there on the veldt and wind up with so many manly tears they could barely shoot down the rampaging rhino with their Mannlicher. Hunters are villains today, or they shoot with cameras, or they shoot robots or aliens or get killed by velociraptors in Jurassic Park. Wild nature, as it shrinks and lessens, becomes friendlier, more familiar. Instead of our dominion, it has become an ecosystem. We are all in it together, the only difference being we still eat many of them for dinner. We rescue critters with one hand, trying to pretend they’re our eco-buddies, some of them what we like to call remarkably intelligent, like whales and gorillas and parrots and octopuses. There’s so much we can learn, but on the other hand, get those animals out of the way, we got a wall to build. The retired Circus elephants have been sent to the Center for Elephant Conservation in Florida. PETA is still not content with this, because that’s not a real sanctuary – it has huts and chains and exposure to tuberculosis. Well PETA will never be happy. When they heard about a remake of DUMBO they wrote a letter to Tim Burton urging him to have Dumbo and Mom end up at a sanctuary at the end of the movie. Because even imaginary animals deserve ethics. On the other hand, I just read a report by the Center for Consumer Freedom, which certainly sounds legitimate. CCF claims that shelters run by PETA are a little bit trigger happy. At least in Virginia. “Since reporting euthanasia statistics became mandatory in 1998,“ according to CCF, “PETA has killed over 85%, or 36,000, of the animals at its Norfolk shelter.” I don’t know what to make of that. I know that PETA does not like the trap- neuter- release approach to feral cat control, because cats are predators and would still be hell on gophers, snakes, rats, and, sad to say, birds. Maybe PETA thinks that a cat is better off euthanized than being trapped in an abusive relationship with a cat lover who’s just going to drive his cat crazy with laser lights, and then post the videos on YouTube. The cruelty must stop. It ends here. As a cat owner myself, I sometimes feel bad that I don’t allow my neutered cat to have sex or kill a cute little mouse in my pathetic little yard, but on the other hand he’ll probably live to a ripe old age, not succumbing to the contagious diseases and cars that strike cats down. As for elephants, I don’t know. Given the choice between butchering them in the wild for their tusks or making them do tricks in a circus for peanuts I’d pick B. Because the fact is, no matter what, we are the dominators in this earthly dominion. If any animals are going to survive in the future, it will be at our whim. Cruel, but true. Not just animals, but humans could use responsible supervision in a sustainable habitat. What can we do? There is no animal control, or PETA, for humans. Maybe some nice alien invasion will save us. Some nice alien species will come here, trim our claws, take us for walks, think it’s cute that we can talk. Nice human. Good human. Don’t destroy the planet, okay? Here some gluten free kibble for you. I gotta go

Tiffany Austin
Holding hands at midnight ‘neath the starry sky, nice work if you can get it and you can get it if you try. Strolling with the one girl sighing sigh after sigh, nice work if you get it and you can get it if you try.

John Perry
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW Local Public Radio and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2017.

Ken Taylor
Our executive producers are David Demarest and Matt Martin. Special thanks to the Stanford Law School, the McCoy Center for Ethics and Society, the Student Animal Legal Defense Fund, the Stanford People for Animal Welfare, Students for Sustainable Stanford and the Peace and Justice Studies Initiative.

John Perry
Thanks also to Jack Herrera, Alex Ching, Dan Brandon, Crystal Nickerson, and to our musical guests: Adam Shulman on piano, David Ewell on bass, and Tiffany Austin on vocals.

Ken Taylor
The Senior Producer of Philosophy Talk is the one and only Devon Strolovitch. Laura McGuire is our Director of Research, and our marketing director is Cindy Prince Baum.

John Perry
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, and the partners at our online community of thinkers.

Ken Taylor
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

John Perry
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

John Perry
Thank you for thinking

Tiffany Austin
And if you get it, won’t you tell me how.