Lucy was one of the first of the signing chimpanzees. She was taught American Sign Language back in the early 1970s by primatologist Roger Fouts. Lucy was raised as if she were a human and, among her other accomplishments, she even taught herself how to masturbate using a vacuum cleaner, while looking at pictures of naked men in Playgirl Magazine! When she was 12, her human hosts could no longer keep her, so she was shipped off to a great ape preserve in Africa. Unfortunately, this organzation decided to release her into the wild (for which she was entirely unprepared). A poacher shot and skinned her, chopped off her hands and feet and sold them as souvenirs to tourists.

Ally was a male chimp who learned ASL from Dr. Fouts. He had a vocabulary of 180 ASL signs and was particularly proficient in coining novel terms (for example, after he first tasted a radish, he named it “cry-hurt-food”. Dr. Fouts allowed Ally and a female chimp — Washoe — to mate. As Washoe became more noticeably pregnant, Ally signed “what that?” while pointing at her stomach. Washoe replied “baby” (neither had been coached in any way). In 1982, Ally was sold to the White Sands Research Center, ostensibly for behavioral experiments. In fact, he was injected with insecticides for toxicity tests, from which he soon died.

Booie was another male chimp taught ASL by Dr. Fouts during the 1970s. A few years later, the university that “owned” Booie sold him to the notorious Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP) in New York. Six years later, Fouts managed to get permission to visit Booie at his cage. After signing a greeting to Booie, Booie signed back “key out” repeatedly; clearly asking to be set free. Unfortunately, Dr. Fouts was unable to secure Booie’s freedom, as Booie had been intentionally infected with Hepatitis C by the lab, as part of an experiment. SEVENTEEN YEARS later, Fouts and Hugh Downs, along with a CBS camera crew, devised to visit Booie in the lab. They found him lying face-down in his small cage, with nothing for stimulation (toys or other objects), and certainly no exterior windows or daylight. As soon as Booie noticed Fouts, he shrieked with happiness and signed “Roger, Roger, hurry come hug Booie”. This, after 17 years of not seeing each other! After a few hours of signing to each other (Booie had remembered most of the signs that Fouts had taught him, 23 years before), Fouts had to leave. Booie curled up in the corner of his cage, crying and rocking back and forth.

Clearly, the commonality here is that, so long as humans consider great apes to be “things” rather than as intelligent, sentient, communicative hominids, they will always be exploited at our whim.

Furthermore, evolution has no opinion about whether we’re the pinnacle of the food chain and ought to rule over all creation forever. If city life turns out to select for bigger, smarter raccoons, and they outcompete us and take over, evolution won’t give a hoot. It’s a way things happen, not a way things ought to be.

If you’re going to make an argument from evolution, you ought to find out what evolution is.

And damned if I know why you’re dragging PETA and Greenpeace into this. Or did you not bother to click on the link and read the story before you shot your mouth off?

In sum, if your ambition was to make yourself a pinata, you’ve succeeded. Congratulations.

Standing Upright: The Moral and Legal Standing of Humans and Other Apes
Stanford Law Review, Vol. 54, p. 163, 2001
Adam J. Kolber
Princeton University, Center for Human Values

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=675851

The exact same argument has been trotted out for centuries to justify the exclusion non-whites from the right to freedom, of women from the right to vote, of children from the right to not be subject to essentially slave labor. More saliently, it was also used to justify bull-baiting, bear-baiting, horse-whipping, dog-fighting, cockfighting, skinning cats alive and a host of other forms of exploitation by humans against non-human animals. You claim that non-human animals can’t have rights because they aren’t human. I have news for you: they already do. Try shooting a California condor and see how far the “it can’t have rights” argument gets you. Companion animals are likewise afforded a form of rights; where I live it’s illegal to leave a companion animal locked in a car, for example.

You claim that there’s something special about humans that entitles us to rights, in an example of the most circular of reasoning: because we have granted them to ourselves. That’s remarkably similar to theists “proving” the correctness of their particular superstition by citing their own texts; it proves nothing. Did you miss the part where I pointed out that the very Foundation documents of our nation assert that we derive our rights from *nature*? How are _you_ more a part of nature than is a chimpanzee?

“Regarding language, although I haven’t read the book you mentioned, I think my master’s in linguistics trumps your light science reading…” Such hubris, Mr. Armbruster! I have a Masters in Philosophy, which I’d be happy to pit against your grasp of that topic any day. The principle objections to the assertion that non-human great apes can adopt human languages come from people like Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker — both experts in *human* linguistics, but neither anywhere near experts in *non-human* linguistics. Roger Fouts and other primatologists with decades of direct experience in the matter, argue otherwise and, I think, far more convincingly. A century ago, the claim that a bonobo like Kanzi could understand more than 3,000 English words would’ve been dismissed as nonsense. Now that we know that non-human great apes *can* understand and use human language, the protests have shifted to narrower grounds. Ten years from now, some linguists will be complaining that non-human apes can’t properly conjugate nouns. It’s a direct parallel to “the god of the gaps”.

Strangely, your background in linguistics doesn’t seem to have prevented you from missing two central facts: (1) that humans are accorded full “rights” regardless of whether they have the ability to communicate at all, whereas other great apes are not, despite their ability to communicate with us in human languages, and (2) that it is understood beyond any reasonable doubt that many species use their species *own* language with which to communicate *within* their species. In short, communication may not be the litmus test for “being-hood”, but what evidence we have so far is more in non-human great apes’ support than against it. How many non-human languages can you speak?

And as for your rather bizarre “fuck test” — need I point out that children of human miscegenation were once denied legal rights in this country (and elsewhere)? What changed between then and now — the physiology of mixed-race humans or our understanding of our commonalities? It is that same evolution of understanding that has ever widened the circle of regard to include those of other ethnicities, genders, sexual identities, ages, and so forth; each of those struggles dismissed at the time as “absurd”, and each eventually accepted as self-evident. If you won’t recognize the writing on the wall about this struggle, it’s not for lack of good evidence.

” The law typically treats great apes and other non-humans as property and not as persons. This is so, even though great apes have cognitive abilities that exceed those of some mentally-deficient humans. Nevertheless, these humans are entitled to the full range of personhood rights, while apes are entitled to none of them. Without attempting to resolve this discrepancy, I suggest more modestly that those rights we do extend to apes under the Animal Welfare Act might be more easily safeguarded if we were to extend legal standing to apes, allowing suit to be brought on their behalf by human guardians. Doing so would not require us to view apes as persons but would provide increased protections for these surprisingly intelligent creatures.”

Why do you keep beating up the same straw man? Nobody is claiming that their aren’t differences between humans and other animals. They question is which of those differences, if any, are relevant to the determination of legal or moral personhood. Guess what, there are also differences between men and women; there are differences between Catholics and Lutherans; there are differences between me and you. There are differences everywhere, and no one is denying that. But which differences are morally and legally important?

Now your point (1) is actually interesting and relevant in this regard. If you had taken more philosophy classes you may have encountered Morals By Agreement by David Gauthier, in which he develops a more sophisticated version of this point. One problem with this view, which Gauthier accepts, is that it implies we have no obligations to the disabled or the infirmed who are little threat to us and are in no position to reciprocate any benefits we might give.
But note that this criterion – the capacity for mutual benefit and responsibility – is not a biological category at all. In fact there are members of our own species who lack this capacity (actually we’re all born lacking that capacity). Moreover, there is nothing that can rule out in the abstract that members of some other species (or even some mechanical intelligence) might have this same feature.
It is thus a matter for empirical investigation whether some apes are capable of such a relation with us. For what it’s worth, I share your skepticism in this regard, but it’s not worth much since I know very little about primate research.

One thing you would have learned from more philosophy training is clarity and rigor in your arguments. If the bounds of personhood are determined primarily by mutual benefit and accountability, then species membership as such has nothing to do with it. Species membership is nothing but a red herring.

The line between “animal” and “person” is simple: If you copulate with it and offspring result, it’s a person, and deserves all rights and privileges afforded you and yours. If not, it’s an animal, and doesn’t.

This whole idiotic argument that being against animal rights is like being for slavery ignores the basic fact that there is a whole host of demonstrable and easily verifiable genetic and social differences between black people and animals. The fact that I have to point that should make anyone trotting out that bizarre argument uncomfortable enough to finally stop using it. It is clear race-baiting, and does nothing to address the real issue at hand.

Moreover, I’d like to point out that if we ever are in contact with some kind of alien intelligence, the differences between us and them are sure to cause ultimate horror and hatred, at least on our side, and, it seems to me, very likely on theirs (although that is utterly unknowable). We may not even recognize each other as even being “alive.” It’s a silly, moot point.

Pretending that there is no difference, within human society, between non-homo sapiens and homo sapiens is utterly bizarre. In the grand scheme of things, yes, we are all just a greasy patina on this rock called Earth, but law and society is not and should not be interested in the grand, universal scheme of things. Taken from that view, all bets are off and nothing is meaningful. It is the absolute opposite of what we try to do in our daily lives as organisms and how we try to solve problems as societies with our laws.

There’s a line. It’s big, black, and bold. Stop pretending there isn’t.

“The corporation point is one I avoided for good reason: it’s a very good legal point, whereas I was more interested in the more general question of personhood. For the record, I don’t think corporations SHOULD be considered persons and afforded the same rights and privileges (I’d make fun of you for misspelling that, but truth be told, Firefox has saved me both times this morning when I typed it!), partly because it sets a legal precedent for silliness such as granting personhood to other non-human entities.”

Really. So would you argue, then, that when a group of people come together and incorporate themselves as, say, Planned Parenthood, that the entity known as PP should not be afforded the same rights of free speech that those people who make up the corporation individually possess?

Anyway, corporations are treated as persons precisely because they are entities created by individuals who *are* persons. Non-human animals, however, are a horse of a different color so to speak.

Whether

We all have biological impulses. We kill and murder out of rage, emotion, jealousy, territory.

Humans frequently follow others in a pack mentality, when independent thought and reason is turned off.

We frequently live in fear, we follow leaders, we react instead of evaluate. (Which is sometimes unavoidable, because our life is at stake — a survival instinct shared by every other creature on the planet.

Something big enough stomps on us, like a meteor, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Really, how intelligent are we?

If we were truly intelligent we would take responsibility for this entire planet and take care of everything on it — instead of a “me, me, me” mentality … which seems strangely animalistic.

What happened so far? They asked a provincial judge to rule that this ape is a “person” in the legal sense, so that a solicitior could act on his behalf. The judge denied that motion. They filed an appeal with the regional court of appeals, which denied that appeal (on technical grounds, as far as I can tell.) So they lodged an extraordinary appeal to the Supreme Court, which under the best of circumstances has a very slim chance to succeed, and practically none in this case. It, too, will most likely be rejected a limine.

There is no way the court will have to ponder the underlying question in some depth. Also, the law’s quite clear on that point, and it would need to be changed by parliament. The court really cannot decide any differently.

Did I mention this was a publicity stunt?

Nobody is trying to say there’s no difference between homo sapiens and any other species – that’s your particular straw man.

gt bck t yr gddmnd PT rlly.

came up in a case of someone trying to free a dolphin .. who was claiming they were freeing a person not a dolphin …

Second, you say “The line between ‘animal’ and ‘person’ is simple…If not, it’s an animal, and doesn’t.” I hate to have to point out the obvious, but what are humans, if not animals? We share at least 98% of our DNA with chimps. What are you — a vegetable? — a mineral?

Third, you wrote “This whole idiotic argument that being against animal rights is like being for slavery ignores the basic fact that there is a whole host of demonstrable and easily verifiable genetic and social differences between black people and animals.” And what are those differences based upon? At this point, they’re based upon nothing more objective than reverse-engineering of relative values. Intelligence? A severely-retarded human is surpassed in most cognitive respects by any normal non-human great ape, and yet that human enjoys the full legal protection that is withheld from the non-human ape. Ability to communicate with intelligible language? There are chimps and gorillas who have vocabularies of hundreds of English words and can use them to synthesize new meanings. Before you start pulling the race card, I suggest you read “The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery” by Marjorie Spiegel, which demolishes your argument in about the first 20 pages. Or read some Peter Singer who has written a number of books that provide easy refutations of your claims.

Fourth, you state “I’d like to point out that if we ever are in contact with some kind of alien intelligence, the differences between us and them are sure to cause ultimate horror and hatred, at least on our side, and, it seems to me, very likely on theirs”. I might as well ask now: are you an expert on hypothetical lifeforms, SETI, ANYTHING relevant to this issue? Or are you just fond of making blanket assertions from ignorance and expecting to sway the masses? I’ll try your tack for a moment and proclaim “if we ever are in contact with some kind of alien intelligence, the differences between us and them are sure to cause ultimate love and respect”. I trust you won’t expect me to back up my claims.

Finally, on the matter of the “rights” that we Americans of the species Homo sapiens already enjoy, I’ll point out the the Declaration of Independence clearly states that we enjoy our rights entirely because we are entitled to them by nature, NOT because we happen to possess average IQs of 100, or have vocabularies of at least 1,000 words, or any other trait. As the Founding Fathers asserted, it is *nature* which endows us with the essential rights of freedom from oppression, nothing else. What are other members of our taxonomic family of hominidae, if not fellow agents of nature?

You still haven’t addressed my central criticism. Why should we think that the biological category ‘homo sapien’ should be mapped exactly on the legal category ‘person’ or the (distinct) moral category ‘person?’

You haven’t addressed the further point (which Tensegrity beat me to), which is that we already recognize corporations as legal persons. You seem to be advocating a rather sweeping restructuring of our legal system, one that would have rather sweeping economic implications.

Finally, the question of whether we would be in a position to recognize the personhood of some alien species is entirely separate from the question of whether they might actually be (moral) persons. Moreover, even if we COULD identify the intelligence of alien life, your argument absurdly implies that would be irrelevant to their moral and legal status, since they would belong to a different species.

You seem to think this is irrelevant because it’s so unlikely that we’d ever meet such a species. But the point isn’t that we need to plan for that contingency – what our views are about hypothetical scenarios is an important way to test the boundaries of our concepts. This is especially important for contested concepts like ‘person.’

If the racial argument is too distant, look at the arguments raging in our society over gay marriage. Your “fuck test” for personhood is also one of the arguments trotted out by homophobes in opposition to gay marriage.

No one is claiming that chimps be scientifically reclassified as Homo sapiens; the question is a moral and legal one, and those questions are hard. Invoking science or the natural order to deny rights is what smacks of eugenics and other abhorrent trends of the past.

I thought Tardigrades were the dominant and superior species?

But being a philosopher, aren’t you uncomfortable with dismissing an argument simply because it has been applied to people and situations which are now unpopular? There’s nothing particular wrong with drawing a line, and I have proposed a very concrete and irrefutable way of drawing it.

As I was eating lunch today, though, it occurred to me that we were getting way, way off track.

My central argument is not “animals do not think,” because anyone who has ever had a pet can tell you they do. It is not “animals cannot communicate,” because, once again, you don’t have to have access to these parrots and bonobos to know that yes, they most certainly do–both with others of their species and with humans. My central argument is “it doesn’t matter if they do.” They are not human. They are not people.

The “fuck test” is simply a funny way of pointing out the obvious: these are different animals.

This is my last post on this, because we’re never going to end it, and it really is a stupid argument, so just some final thoughts:

1) Are there responsibilities associated with personhood? We are expected to follow laws and pay taxes, etc. We afford each other rights we’d like to have because there is a mutual benefit to doing so, and we have a reasonably sound expectation that other people will see it that way and cooperate responsibly. Not so with animals.

2) FYI, Chomsky’s star is kind of falling. His ideas on language (universal grammar, etc.) just plain don’t line up with cognitive psychology. He’s just dreaming these things up, IMO.

3) What do primatologists have to gain from saying monkeys can talk? Research grants, book deals… Besides, they get to hang out with bonobos, which sounds fun. What do linguists have to gain by saying that there is a massive difference between humans’ infinitely-expandable, infinitely-variable language systems and having a series of different signals to alert others to the presence of something that may eat them? Public scorn, accusations of racism, and no chance at a book, because, let’s be honest here, it’s not very interesting (for proof, look no further than my posts, fuck test aside!). That isn’t to say, of course, that they can’t be speaking in their own interests and be right; it just you have to consider the source.

4) This is the kind of argument people who know that their next meal is already in the fridge (or, even better, two people with MAs from colleges of the liberal arts) have, which is why I think that–even as I argue as vigorously as I have–it’s an absurd thing to even discuss. Can you imagine, say, coffee farmers, nearly enslaved by Folger’s or whomever, having this argument? Or what abut the people who actually live around chimps’ natural habitat? Do they consider them people? Or do they toss them in sacks to sell to us so we can debate over whether they are people or not? Our basic lives as organisms (in the rich, developed world) are so ordered that we have to find other things to impose order on. We’re projecting our social order on the natural world as though it were relevant. It’s not.

Only Americans have rights, because they are granted by Americans for the sake of America’s shared wellbeing. What American benefits from bestowing personhood on a foreigner? It’s patently ridiculous.

It’s doubtless my background in mathematical theory, but I think Kyle ought to re-examine his preconceptions of the “obvious”.

Humans have more than one society; for example, Iranian and American societies are quite different. However, most modern societies grant at least some rights to someone from another society, if not necessarily all of the rights its members may have. While perhaps more different than most human societies are from each other, the great apes (and elephants, BTW) seem to have at least as much a “society” as humans do.

The question is, what rights should human society recognize for these outsiders?

Confucius advised “What a man dislikes in his superiors, let him not display in the treatment of his inferiors;” it’s not a bad principle. Even if humanity has no evident superiors, we should try to treat our inferiors as we would hope to be treated, should we someday encounter them — or perhaps, manage to create them. While I’m not sure the full rights of a citizen are appropriate, I feel that failing to grant any rights is the wrong decision.

In addition to the earlier reference to Heinlein’s “Jerry Was a Man”, I’d like to suggest David Brin’s short story Lungfish as presenting another interesting scenario about “human” rights.

“I hate to have to point out the obvious, but what are humans, if not animals? We share at least 98% of our DNA with chimps.”

…And? We share quite a lot with fruit flies as well. That doesn’t make them homo sapiens. That’s my argument. An ape isn’t human. Only humans have rights, because they are granted by humans for the sake of humanity’s shared wellbeing. What human benefits from bestowing personhood on an entirely different species? It’s patently ridiculous.

The corporation point is one I avoided for good reason: it’s a very good legal point, whereas I was more interested in the more general question of personhood. For the record, I don’t think corporations SHOULD be considered persons and afforded the same rights and privileges (I’d make fun of you for misspelling that, but truth be told, Firefox has saved me both times this morning when I typed it!), partly because it sets a legal precedent for silliness such as granting personhood to other non-human entities.

That being said, at least a corporation is a body made up of humans. Humans do very clearly benefit from that legal decision (not all humans, and not all the time, and therein lies the rub!). It still squeaks by on a technicality. Once again, what human benefits from granting personhood to an ape?

Regarding language, although I haven’t read the book you mentioned, I think my master’s in linguistics trumps your light science reading when I say, no, we don’t consider such talking animals to be using language at a level anywhere near what we could consider “human.” For example, the English language has 2000 basic word families that make up 95% of English language usage. These apes and birds don’t even get anywhere near that. And before you lean on that 95% too hard, even that isn’t enough to really be a proficient user of the language, because that still means that one word in 20 will be unknown. Understanding anything other than the most basic linguistic input would be beyond someone or something at that level. Even humans can’t reliably understand at that level, because one has to know about 98% of the words in a sample before guessing can compensate for the rest. And that is with humans, who have innate linguistic talents that far outstrip those of any animal we’ve looked at. These low-hundreds-level-vocabulary animals are little more than a sideshow curiosity, linguistically speaking, although they do reveal interesting things about the brain, to be sure. But identifying colors and asking for hugs does not a person make. Sorry.

Regarding the aliens comment, of course I have nothing to back such a claim up, aside from the fact that I know that if an alien walked or floated or oozed through my door right now, my first impulse would be to crap my pants and my second would be to kill it before it kills me. I suspect that would be a common reaction. I once saw some footage of some Danish (I think) linguists approaching an African (I think) tribe that hadn’t had any contact with outsiders. They just sat in their camp and let the tribe decide what to do when they came upon them. The women hid, as did many of the men. They then sent some young strong guys across the stream to check them out. One came up to the camera, so you could see into his eyes as he sized up the horrid white thing standing behind it.

In those eyes was abject terror. Twice he pulled back his stone axe as if to kill this monster, but reconsidered. It seemed a coin toss whether these Danes were going to come out of this alive.

And that is with another human. A hominid. I can only imagine how that would have gone down if it was something totally alien.

Ultimately, though, the f*ck test would demonstrate whether these Danes were one of their own or not. It doesn’t require any medical or scientific equipment. It’s instinctual. Its findings are irrefutable.

We draw the line where we do because it is the clearest line we can draw to reign in our responsibility. If people want to keep chimps around for whatever reason, that’s fine with me. But don’t pretend that they’re the same thing. They aren’t. We all know they aren’t. Pretending they are is just dominant-species guilt.