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A New York judge has come out in support of granting “personhood” to chimpanzees.
Yes – you read that correctly. A lawsuit in New York brought by the Nonhuman Rights Project seeks to declare chimpanzees “persons.”
“Does an intelligent nonhuman animal who thinks and plans and appreciates life as human beings do have the right to the protection of the law against arbitrary cruelties and enforced detentions visited on him or her?” asked Court of Appeals Associate Judge Eugene M. Fahey in a concurring opinion refusing to grant a motion permitting an appeal. “This is not merely a definitional question, but a deep dilemma of ethics and policy that demands our attention.”
“To treat a chimpanzee as if he or she had no right to liberty protected by habeas corpus is to regard the chimpanzee as entirely lacking independent worth, as a mere resource for human use, a thing the value of which consists exclusively in its usefulness to others,” Judge Fahey continued. “Instead, we should consider whether a chimpanzee is an individual with inherent value who has the right to be treated with respect (see generally Regan, The Case for Animal Rights 248-250).”
It is disturbing that he quotes Tom Regan, the American philosopher whose writings are credited with driving the modern animal rights movement forward.
One of Regan’s tenets is that if we want to ascribe value to all human beings regardless of their ability to be rational agents (i.e. infants, mentally incompetent, elderly), then to be consistent, we must similarly ascribe it to non-humans.
There is a distinct difference between animal rights and animal welfare. Current animal welfare laws consider animal abuse as a very serious crime. Granting human rights to animals is a slippery slope that elevates animals to the moral status of humans. Even more insidious, it reduces humans to status of animals.
In his book Less Than Human, Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others, David Livingstone Smith observes, (regarding the Jewish holocaust), “They were Untermenschen — subhumans — and as such were excluded from the system of moral rights and obligations that bind humankind together. It's wrong to kill a person, but permissible to exterminate a rat.”
The question is, who then makes the decision regarding where humans belong in the hierarchy of the animal kingdom? Perhaps an adherent of the philosophy of Tom Regan, or a follower of animal rights activist Ingrid Newkirk (President of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)? Her famous quote, “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy,” would appear to argue an “eenie, meeny, miney, mo” selection process would be just fine.
A slippery slope indeed.
Source: Safari Club International (SCI)
Yes – you read that correctly. A lawsuit in New York brought by the Nonhuman Rights Project seeks to declare chimpanzees “persons.”
“Does an intelligent nonhuman animal who thinks and plans and appreciates life as human beings do have the right to the protection of the law against arbitrary cruelties and enforced detentions visited on him or her?” asked Court of Appeals Associate Judge Eugene M. Fahey in a concurring opinion refusing to grant a motion permitting an appeal. “This is not merely a definitional question, but a deep dilemma of ethics and policy that demands our attention.”
“To treat a chimpanzee as if he or she had no right to liberty protected by habeas corpus is to regard the chimpanzee as entirely lacking independent worth, as a mere resource for human use, a thing the value of which consists exclusively in its usefulness to others,” Judge Fahey continued. “Instead, we should consider whether a chimpanzee is an individual with inherent value who has the right to be treated with respect (see generally Regan, The Case for Animal Rights 248-250).”
It is disturbing that he quotes Tom Regan, the American philosopher whose writings are credited with driving the modern animal rights movement forward.
One of Regan’s tenets is that if we want to ascribe value to all human beings regardless of their ability to be rational agents (i.e. infants, mentally incompetent, elderly), then to be consistent, we must similarly ascribe it to non-humans.
There is a distinct difference between animal rights and animal welfare. Current animal welfare laws consider animal abuse as a very serious crime. Granting human rights to animals is a slippery slope that elevates animals to the moral status of humans. Even more insidious, it reduces humans to status of animals.
In his book Less Than Human, Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others, David Livingstone Smith observes, (regarding the Jewish holocaust), “They were Untermenschen — subhumans — and as such were excluded from the system of moral rights and obligations that bind humankind together. It's wrong to kill a person, but permissible to exterminate a rat.”
The question is, who then makes the decision regarding where humans belong in the hierarchy of the animal kingdom? Perhaps an adherent of the philosophy of Tom Regan, or a follower of animal rights activist Ingrid Newkirk (President of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)? Her famous quote, “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy,” would appear to argue an “eenie, meeny, miney, mo” selection process would be just fine.
A slippery slope indeed.
Source: Safari Club International (SCI)
