The Great Ape Project: Should Apes Get Human Rights?

[mumblethrax]

Right, and apes have rights in relation to other apes. They have their own morality and their own social contract. What they do not have is human morality or human social contract, thus they are not to be arbitrarily written half-way into the social contract for the sake of making some people sleep better at night.

Rights are a human institution with a definite and relatively short history: apes have not constructed rights at all.

As an analogy, consider that there are human societies on the planet right now for whom everything you argue is also true: they have their own morality and their own society, with only limited contact and even more limited understanding of the modern world. It is nevertheless considered dirty pool to murder them. Declarations of universal rights are understood to apply regardless of whether a minority group understands that they are protected by them: they are agreements between states, not between societies or individuals.

As far as the 2-year-old, I can take her family to court. There is someone who assumes responsibility for her, despite allowances for special protections under the law. But with apes - this isn't the case at all. They will never 'grow up' and they do not have a human custodian. In this way, they are nature. I don't take the weather to court for destroying my house, because I have no contract with the weather. I simply suck up the loses. Now, if the ape is someone's custody, it is treated as property, and the owner assumes responsibility for their actions and also protects the ape's interests, sort of like a 2-year-old child.

As it happens, there are humans who will never grow up in the sense you mean, and there are humans who have no families. There is also considerable overlap between these two groups. In general, they will become the responsibility of the state in modern societies. A sensible way to fulfill obligations to apes under this declaration would be for the state--or those private organizations willing to act as guardians (zoos, sanctuaries, research facilities)--to assume legal responsibility for non-human persons.

 

[Beerina]

I agree. Humans can have rights because they can recognize those rights and, hopefully, not vioilate them in others.

Humans extend that to subsets of humanity (children, the mentally disabled, people sleeping or unconscious) as a practical matter given the horrors of our own history.

Apes cannot recognize rights in others, behaving as animals per passions, regardless of what occasional glimmers they may have about building a tool or simple comminications. As such, they are no different from a dog or a rock.

Having said that, they do experience pain as humans do, of this I have no doubt. Painful medical experiments should probably be avoided if at all possible. But this is a recognition humans can give them because of the nature of the human mind. Apes and dogs and rocks rolling downhill cannot comprehend the suffering in others and act to not cause it. (Yes I recognize they can empathize with suffering to a limited extent -- dogs can detect whimpering in other dogs and humans for that matter -- indeed, this is what whimpering evolved to do, to induce, hand-in-hand, helpful behavior, even if it's just licking a wound or something. That's not the quite the same thing though.) No ape or dog is gonna look at another ape's offspring, or a bush baby, or a rabbit and think, "I'm not gonna go eat that because it will suffer pain."

 

[FarmallMTA]

Only If...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Ape_Project

capable of desiring sex change operations. That would be the ultimate "now" definition of human.

 

[UnrepentantSinner]

Apes cannot recognize rights in others, behaving as animals per passions, regardless of what occasional glimmers they may have about building a tool or simple comminications. As such, they are no different from a dog or a rock.

Rocks have passions?

No ape or dog is gonna look at another ape's offspring, or a bush baby, or a rabbit and think, "I'm not gonna go eat that because it will suffer pain."

I generally agree with your comments about how prescient other animals are of the pain of their fellow beings, but I think you might be stipping them of the ability to feel sorrow, which I do not.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=koko+allball

 

[FarmallMTA]

Nobody got to this bit yet?



Been there, done that.

Hey, me too! I made a nasty face and flipped the bird to the ape at the zoo and he threw crap and hit my mother in law. I gave him a bag of peanuts for the favor later on when she wasn't looking.

 

[Dustin Kesselberg]

Humans should have human rights and Gorillas should have Gorilla rights. Dogs should have dog rights and chimps should have chimp rights. The idea that another species should have the same rights as a human really does not make sense unless that species is intellectually and emotionally the same as a human. The rights that humans have(should have) are molded to fit their specific needs and the same should apply for all other animals. What specific rights other animals get isn't something I will get into however all sentient beings should have the right to be protected from suffering or death unless it's absolutely necessary for one reason or another to violate those rights. Which of course applies with humans as well. Ethically speaking is it ok to experiment on chimps (the most humane way possible) to lead to a cure for a deadly disease where the experiments may lead to suffering or death? Is it ok to torture a human terrorist who you know who has planted a nuclear weapon in a large city to get the location of the weapon?