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Chimpanzee "Personhood" Is Back In Court
sciencehabit writes Chimpanzees are back in court. Judges in New York State heard the first in a series of appeals attempting to grant "legal personhood" to the animals. The case is part of a larger effort by an animal rights group known as the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) to free a variety of creatures—from research chimps to aquarium dolphins—from captivity. If the case is successful, it could grant personhood to chimps throughout the state.
If chimps are people, will they be able to vote? Hold political office? Cue the jokes.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
The idea of a chimp, or other primate being intelligent enough to be considered human isn't new. Heinlein covered it back in 1947 in Jerry Was a Man. If you haven't read it yet, you really need to before discussing this article any further.
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You just pulled the rights from a a metric fuck ton of mentally & physically handicapped people
There are lots of humans you can't legally marry. They pretty much all have one thing in common: they can't legally give consent.
Also, you really shouldn't look at your sister that way.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
...this case should have been tossed. One can't file on behalf of another (unless they are a legal guardian or hold a power of attorney), and the plaintiffs also can't show any personal harm to themselves.
If they feel strongly enough about the issue, the remedy is political. Convince enough people that 2/3 of Congress and 3/4 of state legislatures will agree, and pass a Constitutional amendment.
Now if we can just get them all to sign up and donate money.
On the other hand, if you can't fend for yourself then you should have fewer rights and probably should be treated as a child.
Which rights do you propose to take away from the highly physically disabled?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
and argue their own case in court. Next question.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
In virtually ever jurisdiction in the industrialized world children under a certain age cannot give consent for a variety of activities; sexual intercourse, signing contracts, medical treatments, etc. That a nine year old cannot consent to having sex or signing a contract doesn't mean they aren't a person. Personhood alone doesn't afford all rights and privileges, but it does guarantee the basic liberties.
I can imagine animals like chimps, dolphins and elephants being granted personhood under the law, but being that they do not have the cognitive and rational capacities of humans (well, I'm not so sure about elephants, there is something kind of spooky about them in the intelligence and emotional departments), they might hold those basic liberties in the same way that a child, a mentally ill person or a severely mentally handicapped person might. They couldn't sign contracts independent of a guardian, they couldn't be given the vote, but they would be protected from egregious violations of their basic civil liberties.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Can they form corporations? That's where it gets really interesting.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Have we forgotten dogs and cats? Shouldn't they have the right to sleep together?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Oh, that's easy.
Said right-wing groups choke money spent on education standards, teach everyone "abstinence only!" when it's not realistic, etc., which results in people having babies because they had unprotected sex and didn't have the education for how to use contraception. Now that babies are born to people who are poor and didn't have the education to know how to reduce the risk of babies from the one act that could take the stress out of their life, they also can't get welfare, medicaid, etc. because "they aren't carrying their fair share," which forces their kids through poverty, shitty education, a lack of contraception knowledge, more babies, and more kids forced through poverty.
Honestly, if hard-right-wingers just said "Hey, we believe abortion is wrong, but use contraception to greatly reduce the risk of having a baby!", they might've actually had some support! But their current stance is "you can't use contraception, and you must take care of anybody you bring into this world on your own. We know you can't help but have sex because it's wired into your brain but screw you anyway."
Independent voter here. I usually vote for moderate Republicans, Independents, or moderate Democrats.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
1) Animals already have something resembling rights, in the form of animal cruelty laws; the question here is whether those rights should be expanded to include some of the things guaranteed to humans.
There is a spectrum of opinion on what "animal rights" means. At the very least, I think animal rights include the right not to suffer needlessly at the hand of humans. I doubt anyone would argue that is also a human right. So, continuing in that direction, I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that many human rights can be accorded to animals also.
Arguably, what we humans call animal rights are really just human-law restrictions on our own behavior (and good ones IMHO.) However, I think it captures their intent to call them "rights" so I embrace the term.
2) Plenty of humans (children, or, as someone else pointed out, the handicapped) can't hold down jobs or feed themselves. Chimps and dolphins, on the other hand, typically are able to feed themselves. So what you're saying is, chimps and dolphins should have more rights than children and the disabled?
I don't think it's a question of "more" rights, just different ones, and with the qualifier I mentioned above that we're really talking about human laws, not animal rights. I would say that animals have their own innate sense of rights and justice, and what we think of as their rights is an idealized picture of our relationship with them.
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. -- Henry Beston
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The problem arises when the women end up being among the 1% statistical rate of an IUD failure, or the 20% failure rate of condoms. No matter what *you* think, it is none of your business to put any constrain on the women who's about to have her life fucked up by a baby she does not want.
After seeing cats toy with mice to levels that would unquestionably be considered torture by every nation on Earth if a human was the victim, I have come to the conclusion that "animal rights" is inherently fictitious. Much like "innate rights" or "inalienable rights" for humans, we are merely appeasing our culturally-developed sense of morality, ethics, and guilt.
That's not to say those motivating factors aren't good things. In fact, quite the opposite. Clearly there is an evolutionary advantage to social cooperation and baseline rules of morality, otherwise we would not have developed these sociological phenomenon, let alone have the capacity to articulate and discuss them.
More tangibly, this reluctance to abuse other species with certain characteristics is what lead to the domestication of cooperatively useful species (dogs, cats, cattle, etc). But our moral compulsion should not be mistaken for some sort of universally true innate "right".
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
...having a metaphysics that is logically and ethically incoherent.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
You might just wait a few months then.
Amendment 67 in Colorado is a personhood bill that actually has some support this year. I remember when they were collecting signatures and I saw loads of people signing it that had no idea of the ramifications.
Ask the average nitwit if, "a pregnant woman is hit by a drunk driver, should there be two counts of manslaughter?" The knee-jerk response is "well that at least seems reasonable". That is how they worded it to people. Only by reading the proposal will you see how transparently they're trying to make abortion illegal.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
The single most effective technique available to reduce the number of elective abortions would be to promote contraception, in both availability and education. It works - and works almost perfectly. It's the main reason that developed countries have such a low birth rate.
Yet if you look at very any organisation in the pro-life movement you'll find that, almost without exception, they are opposed to contraceptive education, and opposed to providing insurance coverage, and opposed to subsided provision. Many of them (Mostly the ones with Roman Catholic connections) go further than that, and openly consider the use of contraception to be inherently immoral and something that should be legally forbidden.
This contradiction indicates that for all of their rhetoric about the sanctity of life, they are far less concerned with opposing abortion than they are with reversing the sexual revolution and bringing back the natural consequence of pregnancy that once forced everyone to live by the code of their holy text.
The problem with people who honestly believe that they are fighting for a just and vital cause is that they will go to any length of deception and legal trickery to achieve it. The ends justify the means. If the only way to save babies is to subvert the legal process, then it would be unethical not to do so.
I'm not asking for academic citations, intellectual anal palyp. I'm asking for you to explain yourself clearly.
Being lazy and vague gives no one any opportunity to know what you're talking about or judge whether in fact you're making any sense.
You could be a total and complete moron or a total and complete genius... and because you were vague and lazy no one could tell the difference.
So here I come into your comment asking you nicely "hey, please be clear"... to which you respond "this isn't an academic paper with parenthetical references, so I don't even need to be coherent!"...
Which is just stupid.
Last chance... be clear or I have to make some rather obvious assumptions. Your choice.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
A brief scan through the comments on slashdot so far comes up the usual, lame list of "reasons why this is just so stupid, like".
So, this is not about whether chimpanzees should get the vote.
It isn't about whether they should be considered human.
It isn't about whether they should be allowed/forced to take part in human society on an equal footing.
What it is about, is how we treat the animals in our care; part of that has to touch on whether animals have anything like personality: do they 'feel' rather than simply 'react'? Do they have wishes, intentions, thoughts, or are they simply 'flesh machines'? As our insight grows, it becomes harder and harder to deny that many, if not most, animals are like ourselves in that respect; what separates us is a matter of degrees rather than something fundamental: humans are more intelligent etc, but there is no reason to think we have a 'soul' which other animals don't have.
The other part of the problem is to decide what we ourselves are, or want to be. When we don't want to torture prisoners, when we don't just get out the popcorn and watch the Ebola epidemic etc, it is because we as a society have the choice to care about others. It wasn't always so, and not everybody agrees. But we have chosen to be the kind of people who care and therefore we find it hard to deliberately cause suffering.
Whether legislation is the right way, I don't know; in my experience people often resent rules and laws that are imposed on them, even if they agree on the sentiment behind them. Basically, it is about respect; we should certainly respect other animals on their terms, but having rules imposed on you doesn't feel very respectful.
I'm not the person you are responding to but I'll chip in.
The idea that a corporate person should have freedom of speech is, I think, a problem. For example, it allows them to spend vast amounts of money on political campaigns. This is undemocratic. Corporations don't get to vote or stand for election, but are allowed to have huge influence over politics through money. Since they are not real people they often act without morals or any sense of human decency, and try to get politicians with a similar disposition elected and the law change to reflect their myopic obsession with profit above all else.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Explain why a corporation should be forbidden from participating in a political cause but the World Wildlife Federation should be allowed to participate? What is the legal difference?
This gets back to basic freedom of association and freedom of speech. The corporation is made up of and represents people just like Save the Whales, Planned Parenthood, or the Teamsters.
If a corporation cannot speak politically then no association should be allowed to speak either. And that means the only people allowed to speak will be individuals. And since associations will be silenced, the only individuals that will be heard will be elites. Billionaires and movie stars.
You can't just cut the corps out and arbitrarily leave the other associations with access without some sort of reason. Simply saying "these groups agree with me and this other group doesn't" just means you're silencing your opposition.
Think about it.
This attack on the corps has been a rather tired argument thrown around for years. It isn't especially interesting is it?
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Whenever a law would restrict a fundamental right of the individual, such as the freedom of speech, the state must provide compelling reason to violate right and pass the strict scrutiny test. Unders strict scrutiny the law or policy is presumed unconstitutional and the burden of proof lies on the state to show that the policy is necessary in order to achieve a state interest. If proved necessary it must demonstrate that the policy is narrow in scope and not overly broad so as to ensure minimal impact against the right.
What a lot of people, yourself include, misunderstand about Citizens United is that it was never about granting "personhood" to corporations. The ruling only showed that being a member of a group was not sufficient grounds to deny an individual their rights. It's been nearly two centuries since Dartmouth College v. Woodward in which SCOTUS first affirmed that being a member of a group was insufficient grounds to deny an individual his rights. Citizens United was a ruling that simply states that all corporations should be treated equally without exemptions. Corporations are mostly thought of as organizations like Exxon or Goldman Sachs when the reality is that it also includes organizations like CBS, NBC, the Sierra Club, and Planned Parenthood.
The outcome we currently have is pretty much the only outcome which doesn't greatly violate the 1st Amendment by violating freedom of speech, press, or association, violating the 4th's protection against unreasonable searches, or violating the 14th's equal protection clause. The only ways around this is to reverse the decision on Buckley v. Valeo (1976) divorcing speech from money or introduce a constitutional amendment that explicitly grants Congress the right to regulate campaign contributions.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
So if the father didn't want the baby, but the woman did, he shouldn't have to pay child support, right?
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Amen and Amen! I think these (potentially) well-meaning people that want to ban corporations from participating in any kind of political process don't really think their idea though all the way. They THINK they are promoting free-speech... but, in fact, they would simply silence somebody (or a group of people) with whom they disagree. The true test of whether or not one truly adheres to the concept of 'free speech' is his or her reaction when somebody expresses an idea or promotes something with which one disagrees.
If these lawsuits succeed, primate research will not stop. Instead, it will be moved offshore. To other countries that might have fewer animal protections than the United States.
Just like if we stop drilling for oil on our soil, drilling will be moved to some other country. Where environmental protections might be laxer than here.
Primate research, petroleum exploration and drilling, manufacturing...we can do these things here, in the United States, where we have laws that offer reasonable protection against environmental damage and exploitation. Or, we can make them so onerous to do here, that we push them offshore to jurisdictions that offer fewer protections than we do. But stopping them altogether isn't going to happen for the foreseeable future.
Haven't you already noticed how weak social conservatism is getting in the GOP? Many, many people have abandoned that mode of thinking. It's one of the reasons the GOP continues to lose even in the face of the pro-war, pro-bank Democrats: The fiscal conservatives and genuinely small government (even out-of-the-bedroom, anti-war small government) are splintering off from the necons and religious right, and choosing to lose to Democrats instead. Lots of people under 40 who are fiscal conservatives, anti-police state, anti-war, and have no issues at all with social liberalism are continuing not to vote for the extreme right wing.