Briareos H on 13/12/2013 at 08:58
Quote Posted by Nicker
not all persons are people
Quote Posted by NuEffect
Humans who aren't classed as persons are special cases.
All this time of selling yourself as a healthcare professional yet the more the time passes, the more I think you're not even a lab assistant.
SubJeff on 13/12/2013 at 09:02
Mhmmmm.
I'm also not a lawyer. Are you?
I realise I'm talking about something completely different to the OP. You're still a jerk.
Quote Posted by Nicker
being human and being a person are not synonymous under the law in much of the world.
Yakoob on 13/12/2013 at 09:06
Why all the legal recourse? There's a simple way to determine that - if an animal is capable of walking up to someone and, in some form, requesting to be treated as a person, they should be. Until that happens, tho, nope, not-a-person™
SubJeff on 13/12/2013 at 09:11
Well this was where I was coming from Yakoob, but it seems that we've stepped into a courtroom so...
faetal on 13/12/2013 at 10:10
Not sure it is necessary to grant an animal personhood per se. If we're worried about the morality of how we treat animals, then surely it is simpler and less contentious to just expand animal rights, non?
demagogue on 13/12/2013 at 10:17
One problem with reifying personhood too much is that it ignores that reason and language are still cognitive mechanisms much of the support structure of which I'd say humans inherited from common ancestors of other animals that also inherited them, and it gives ammunition for people having a mysterian view of the human soul that's outside the boundaries of natural laws. Also it sort of implies that "language" and "reason" are monolithic switches, like a single or few genes you can identify in human DNA that you can just point to and say, yep, humans have it and animals don't...
But I was reading a literature review of what they were calling "third generation" cognitive science that we're apparently in the middle of now, and it's an absolute mess. It's swimming in data, but it's laughing at the naive optimism they had in the 60s that human-like AI was only a generation away. More to the point, cognitive models are not gelling into monolithic mechanisms at all; even the acclaimed "modular" model is giving way to much more nuanced & tangled network models where you have disparate strands at dozens of different levels overlapping in all sorts of crazy ways, some more holistic, some more reductive. Then the punchline is that some animals share some of these mechanisms in some ways. In fact animal studies are turning out to be one of the more productive avenues in mapping out human rationality...
To take one example I've read, our primate chimpanzee cousins can actually find some game theory Nash equilibria (like the work/shirk game) faster than humans can, and without some of the cognitive biases that humans suffer from (like a status quo or entitlement bias), and what is finding a Nash equilibrium that maximizes your utility if not a kind of rational behavior? In that respect, chimps are more "rational" than humans, since humans are coming to irrational answers that reduce their utility & chimps are finding the more rational solution.
There are prudential reasons why you'd want to reduce the question to a simple "can it talk to you? y/n", not only when you're talking about legal fiction, but even day-to-day wanting to make sense of the world & beings around you, like who you trust to hold your coat or good for dinner conversation. But I think once you get to the nuts and bolts of it, personhood is a hopeless concept that's outlived its philosophical usefulness as describing something we believe is really in the world anymore.
faetal on 13/12/2013 at 10:25
The terms "language" and "reason" are too vague to ring-fence humans anyway. Plenty of animals use language and reason, we just have the anthropocentric notion that whichever way it all pans out, there has to be us on one side and everything else on the other.
Nicker on 13/12/2013 at 18:07
Why all the legaese?It is justifiable because that is the initial tack of this thread, how do we define
persons in a legal sense? If a century or so ago, women and blacks were not persons but today they are, then clearly our understanding of what legally defines a person not constrained to member of the species
homo sapiens sapiens. And if corporations can be persons then the definition is clearly not restricted to living things.
So when I say "not all persons are people", that is not my opinion it is a statement of legal fact (as far as I understand it). Whether that is justifiable or not may be part of the issue but just saying
they ain't because they ain't not only ignores present legal realities it is also begging the question, which is a logical fallacy.
Since the legal definitions of personhood are so plastic, it's not so much a matter of
could animals be defined as persons but
should they be and if so by what criteria?
Quote:
They can't be reasoned WITH is my point.
How do you know that?
They can reason with each other. Gorillas can lie, which means they can distinguish between what is true and what is not. Crows who believe they are being watched while hiding food will return to hide it again, because they know that other crows are capable of and willing to steal from them (since they would, given the opportunity). Bonobos are better at devising cooperative strategies than chimpanzees (something to do with their "love one another right now" attitude).
All four of the above also invent tools, including multiple tools for a single task and making tools with which to make other tools. In addition these behaviours are often cultural, that is they are learned, not instinctual. Where shall we move the goal post to next?
And what faetal and demagogue said...
Vivian on 13/12/2013 at 19:14
Quote Posted by NuEffect
They are not capable of rational or moral reasoning. End of.
well, that's basically not true, is it? Way to argue like a bloody dalek.
SubJeff on 13/12/2013 at 19:45
You can't do a deal with a goddam chimp. If he wants to rip your face off no amount of discussion will change that.
These animals will never conform to any man made law and nor will they conform to our social conventions.
