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Good, we should then start making them liable for violations of laws as well. Dolphin researchers know for example that some dolphins like to form gangs and go

Good, we should then start making them liable for violations of laws as well. Dolphin researchers know for example that some dolphins like to form gangs and go around harassing other dolphins and forcing themselves sexually on female dolphins. Should we also send out the police patrol and lock them up?

jacquesm 17y ago
No, you should leave that to the Dolphin police. To force human norms and laws on Dolphins would be to anthropomorphize (sp?) and that is exactly what the article warns against. If you start of from the assumption they are non-human persons then you'll have to admit to their right to self govern their society.
- elblanco 17y ago
  What about when dolphins violate human laws? Like breaking undersea cables or eating fish hauls still in net, or attacking a human or some other such violation? This would seem to be most closely analogous to an international border violation.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    No, you are still trying to treat Dolphins as human persons. Dolphins could not violate human law since they are not human. International implies nations, Dolphins probably would not recognize nations. For an encore, with a wink to Douglas Adams, they might not even recognize humans as particularly intelligent.
    - elblanco 17y ago
      Of course we both know that mice are in charge. :) I think though, what this shows is that there is the potential for a very interesting and lively debate as to how far something like "non-human person" extends. If we don't hold them liable to any kind of responsibility for particular extensions of rights beyond what we'd show any other animal, then are we not just treating them like another animal -- and thus the new classification as a "non-human person" is simply superfluous?
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        I think your right about that (besides the mice being in charge, which we take as given). The funny thing here is that this is all fine and good as long as we're dealing with inferior intellects, wait what happens if a superior intelligence should come across us and decides to capture and domesticate us and treat us like food. I'm pretty sure we'd be arguing for equal rights for animals :) I really don't remember the title of the story, I think it was a short story in an anthology, it read as a 'care and feeding of your khod' or something like that. The basic idea was that the story was told from the viewpoint of an alien species that kept the obviously non-intelligent khod as a food stock. Lots of rules were laid down about how you should treat your khod if you wanted to get the most mileage out of them. Particular care should be taken when slaughtering the khod, never do this in front of other khod that you do not intend to slaughter right away. Only at the end of the story you realize the khod are captive humans.
ugh 17y ago
I realize that this is supposed to be a joke, but there is an answer to your question and it is (of course) no. Our law could easily deal with dolphins that enjoy human rights protection. Babies are given the full protection of human rights, yet they cannot vote, cannot drive and cannot be made responsible for any crime they may commit. Why not give certain animals a similar status?
- jerf 17y ago
  Rights come with obligations; those who can't discharge those obligations get their rights taken from them. That's not a moral statement, either; that's a descriptive statement of what the current situation is. That is the way it is because it must be that way. Rights are, ultimately, the power to draw on the resources of others in the society (even "the right to free speech" is nothing more and nothing less than the right to draw on the resources of the society to defend your free speech), and for every such draw there must be a corresponding obligation or your putative "right" will draw against a non-existent account. While we like to think about the positive side of "rights", without the corresponding obligations they literally don't exist; phantoms tools that appear to exist right up to the moment when you pick one up whereupon it is revealed to be a trick of the light. Babies are lent their basic rights against their future obligations, and the difference is made up by their parents. Babies and children are extended fewer rights because of their decreased ability to service the resulting obligations, too, so your example isn't even all that great as children's rights are necessarily quite curtailed. Certainly our law could easily deal with obligationless-psuedorights enjoyed by animals, but our society can not deal with them having true rights. Dolphins can be extended unilateral protection, but they can't have actual rights until they can also discharge the resulting obligations. Some would define "right" to include this sort of "unilateral protection" but I think that strips us of a valuable word, and encourages category errors as what are "unilateral protections" one minute silently get upgraded to "rights" (as I have defined them) the next. I am quite certain this is considered desirable by animal "rights" advocate, even if they are not consciously using this exact line of thought. I'm fairly confident that if you asked, animal rights activists would not care to be classified as animal-"unilateral protection" advocates. (Moreover, giving dolphins rights would just be an open invitation to yet more corruption, in the form of "legal representatives" of the en-righted animals suing in the legal system for some recompense or other which oh-so-coincidentally will go back in the pockets of the representatives. If we're really lucky we'll set up a parallel "animal's right court" so the whole system can be set up as a rent-extraction racket. There is in fact an upper limit on how much of this sort of corruption we can tolerate as a society.) (Applying my definition of "right" to the current discussion of a "health-care right" is an interesting exercise left to the reader. For every right, the question of "where's the corresponding obligation?" must be answered.)

jacquesm 17y ago

No, you should leave that to the Dolphin police. To force human norms and laws on Dolphins would be to anthropomorphize (sp?) and that is exactly what the article warns against. If you start of from the assumption they are non-human persons then you'll have to admit to their right to self govern their society.

elblanco 17y ago
What about when dolphins violate human laws? Like breaking undersea cables or eating fish hauls still in net, or attacking a human or some other such violation? This would seem to be most closely analogous to an international border violation.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  No, you are still trying to treat Dolphins as human persons. Dolphins could not violate human law since they are not human. International implies nations, Dolphins probably would not recognize nations. For an encore, with a wink to Douglas Adams, they might not even recognize humans as particularly intelligent.
  - elblanco 17y ago
    Of course we both know that mice are in charge. :) I think though, what this shows is that there is the potential for a very interesting and lively debate as to how far something like "non-human person" extends. If we don't hold them liable to any kind of responsibility for particular extensions of rights beyond what we'd show any other animal, then are we not just treating them like another animal -- and thus the new classification as a "non-human person" is simply superfluous?
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      I think your right about that (besides the mice being in charge, which we take as given). The funny thing here is that this is all fine and good as long as we're dealing with inferior intellects, wait what happens if a superior intelligence should come across us and decides to capture and domesticate us and treat us like food. I'm pretty sure we'd be arguing for equal rights for animals :) I really don't remember the title of the story, I think it was a short story in an anthology, it read as a 'care and feeding of your khod' or something like that. The basic idea was that the story was told from the viewpoint of an alien species that kept the obviously non-intelligent khod as a food stock. Lots of rules were laid down about how you should treat your khod if you wanted to get the most mileage out of them. Particular care should be taken when slaughtering the khod, never do this in front of other khod that you do not intend to slaughter right away. Only at the end of the story you realize the khod are captive humans.

ugh 17y ago

I realize that this is supposed to be a joke, but there is an answer to your question and it is (of course) no. Our law could easily deal with dolphins that enjoy human rights protection. Babies are given the full protection of human rights, yet they cannot vote, cannot drive and cannot be made responsible for any crime they may commit. Why not give certain animals a similar status?

jerf 17y ago
Rights come with obligations; those who can't discharge those obligations get their rights taken from them. That's not a moral statement, either; that's a descriptive statement of what the current situation is. That is the way it is because it must be that way. Rights are, ultimately, the power to draw on the resources of others in the society (even "the right to free speech" is nothing more and nothing less than the right to draw on the resources of the society to defend your free speech), and for every such draw there must be a corresponding obligation or your putative "right" will draw against a non-existent account. While we like to think about the positive side of "rights", without the corresponding obligations they literally don't exist; phantoms tools that appear to exist right up to the moment when you pick one up whereupon it is revealed to be a trick of the light. Babies are lent their basic rights against their future obligations, and the difference is made up by their parents. Babies and children are extended fewer rights because of their decreased ability to service the resulting obligations, too, so your example isn't even all that great as children's rights are necessarily quite curtailed. Certainly our law could easily deal with obligationless-psuedorights enjoyed by animals, but our society can not deal with them having true rights. Dolphins can be extended unilateral protection, but they can't have actual rights until they can also discharge the resulting obligations. Some would define "right" to include this sort of "unilateral protection" but I think that strips us of a valuable word, and encourages category errors as what are "unilateral protections" one minute silently get upgraded to "rights" (as I have defined them) the next. I am quite certain this is considered desirable by animal "rights" advocate, even if they are not consciously using this exact line of thought. I'm fairly confident that if you asked, animal rights activists would not care to be classified as animal-"unilateral protection" advocates. (Moreover, giving dolphins rights would just be an open invitation to yet more corruption, in the form of "legal representatives" of the en-righted animals suing in the legal system for some recompense or other which oh-so-coincidentally will go back in the pockets of the representatives. If we're really lucky we'll set up a parallel "animal's right court" so the whole system can be set up as a rent-extraction racket. There is in fact an upper limit on how much of this sort of corruption we can tolerate as a society.) (Applying my definition of "right" to the current discussion of a "health-care right" is an interesting exercise left to the reader. For every right, the question of "where's the corresponding obligation?" must be answered.)