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Dolphins deserve same rights as humans, say scientists
- protomyth 14y agoOk, so if dolphins were given the same rights as humans, what is done when one dolphin kills another dolphin or other offenses[1]? 1) http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2009/05/13/dolphins_are_violent_predators_that_kill_their_own_babies.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2009/05/13/dolphins_are...
- spiritplumber 14y agoI'm okay with this.
- michaelfeathers 14y agoI think I'm okay with it, but it is a slippery slope. It reminds me of the abortion wars. People want to find a hard line for "when life starts" in a continuum. There's no such thing. I think the same thing could be said of all of the qualities that lead to our notion of personhood.
- EvaPeron 14y agoIf we are on the subject of what animals it is ethical to hunt, etc., how about more strongly protecting the Great Apes (chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans) as they are our closest cousins in nature? Whales are more a rival, than anything else.
- dfgonzalez 14y agoRights come with Obligations, so as long as they pay their taxes too, I'm OK with this
- mattstreet 14y agoPeople that don't have jobs don't have to pay taxes. (Except sales tax)
- netcan 14y agobut they do get the dole.
- swalberg 14y agoThe UN has said that broadband Internet is a basic human right. This is starting to get difficult.
- stephengillie 14y agoInternet access is a basic human right because it vastly improves the quality of human life. Would internet access be a basic dolphin right? They didn't build it...
- GotAnyMegadeth 14y agoNeither did I...
- hk_kh 14y agoThe UN said that cutting down someone's Internet was a human right violation, not that broadband Internet is a basic human right (maybe it's implicit, but it's not the main purpose of the definition). Now, on court, you could appeal to human rights (and, worst case scenario, to AI) if, for instance, you are being prosecuted for rousing up an insurgent concentration on Facebook. Equally, the UN could interpose when a country decides to cut off the Internet to avoid communication during chaos or protests.
- littlegiantcap 14y agoI thought this was one of those negative rights, i.e. it doesn't have to be given to you, it just can't be taken from you.
- icebraining 14y agoNot given, but “Each state should thus develop a concrete and effective policy to make the Internet widely available, accessible, and affordable to all segments of population.” This can imply more than negative rights, in certain cases, but certainly not "free internet for everyone".
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- olalonde 14y agoDon't most countries have fishing quotas within territorial waters as well? Not sure dolphins and whales will be happy with this.
- Evbn 14y agoShow me one dolphin who has exceeded quota.
- nathan_long 14y agoI'd say that rights don't come with obligations inherently. I believe a month-old baby has a right to live, and all it ever does is poop and cry.
- arrrg 14y agoNo they don't. Obviously not. Human rights are inalienable (though sometimes rights clash and then you need a mechanism to decide which one wins).
- rmc 14y agoThat's not how things work. Some people never pay taxes, but have rights.
- lumberjack 14y agoNot necessarily. Human infants have rights even if they are orphans with unknown family lineage. I don't think anyone wants to grant Dolphins the right to vote either. Just some basic protections, such as the right not to be killed without proper justification.
- nathan_long 14y ago>> They believe dolphins and whales are sufficiently intelligent to justify the same ethical considerations as humans. I don't have a problem with extending legal protection to dolphins, but I do think that "intelligence" as the criteria is morally problematic, at least if it's the sole criteria. For instance, could a person with Down's Syndrome be denied protection from murder? The Christian worldview holds that human life has value intrinsically because God values it. Whether you agree with this or not, I hope you'd want to avoid drawing moral conclusions such as "my life is more valuable than my neighbor's because I'm obviously smarter." Especially considering how slippery the definition of "intelligence" is.
- swombat 14y agoTheir view is not that intelligence makes your life more worthwhile, but that there is a threshold of species intelligence which makes that species "persons". Note the focus on a species, rather than individuals.
- crusso 14y agoWhen cetaceans let us know that they will mutually honor some sort of Interspecies Protective Treaty, I will be the first in line to support the move that they should have similar protections to people. Until then, I don't want to see such beautiful intelligent creatures harmed -- but murder/manslaughter charges would be inappropriate if one were inadvertently killed. The current animal protection/endangered species protection rules are sufficient.
- belorn 14y agoThere is a implied statement that cetaceans would somehow need to learn English to receive similar protections as people. This is of course a really bad requirement. A lot of people in the world do not know English, and would thus be unable to let anyone know that they will mutually honor some sort of Interspecies Protective Treaty. Mostly, they would be unable to read any such treaty, or reply with the word "yes". First create a requirement that all human being will pass. Then see if cetaceans do pass it.
- johnnyg 14y agoSorry, but I'm going to need a Dolphin declaration of independence, armed revolution and ability to self sustain through value creation first.
- swombat 14y agoI think it could easily be argued that the dolphins' way of life is more sustainable than ours... Probably not the best line of argument!
- johnnyg 14y agoYou think humans chasing small fish around in the surf is a superior way to live? Seriously? There is nothing stopping you...just keep walking west. :)
- Zaephyr 14y agoSo long, and thanks for all the fish!
- Jach 14y agoIn the long term? No way. Only humans have the potential to spread themselves off this rock and throughout the solar system and beyond. Dolphins are limited to where we take them.
- Osmium 14y agoConversely, only humans have the ability to wipe all forms of intelligent life off this planet and hasten their own destruction. Furthermore, you could've made the same comment about us [humans] just a few thousand years ago. And considering the rate of evolution compared to the length of time this planet is going to be around for, it's probably a bad idea to extrapolate the fate of dolphins in the future based on their current capabilities.
- natex 14y ago"Only humans have the potential to spread themselves off this rock and throughout the solar system and beyond. Dolphins are limited to where we take them." This wasn't always the case, and may not be true in a million years.
- Apreche 14y agoDolphins voting you say. Obama, to the aquarium!
- jawns 14y agoI'd be a lot more sympathetic to the cause of treating dolphins as if they had human rights if we first agreed to treat all humans as if they had human rights.
- w1ntermute 14y agoYep, slavery exists to this day in many parts of Africa and India. That should be our first concern.
- duck 14y agoTo be clear, it exists in most/all countries, even here in the states thanks to human trafficking.
- slowpoke 14y agoOur first, yes, but not our only. Otherwise, dolphins and whales might be extinct soon. There's nothing preventing you from supporting both, say, Amnesty International and Sea Sheperd, or Médecins Sans Frontières and Greenpeace - or all of them. This is not a binary decision.
- jberryman 14y agoNo one is stopping you from helping fix the problem of slavery, especially not animal rights advocates.
- papsosouid 14y agoBut first we need to find out exactly which slaves have it the worst, and free all of them. We can't go around doing good things for anyone other than the absolute worst off people. Luckily this means we can spend all our time debating who has it worst instead of doing anything to help anyone.
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y agoThis is snarcky but it points out as strongly as possible what is so wrong with prioritization of good causes, it should pop out automatically every time someone tries to discuss this. And I would like to add that there are enougth amount of humans for caring about all the good causes.
- TomGullen 14y ago> It is based on years of research that has shown dolphins and whales have large, complex brains and a human-like level of self-awareness How did they conclude dolphins and whales are self-aware comparatively to humans? That seems like quite a large claim to make and the argument significantly hinges on this. I wasn't aware of any scientific method to prove self awareness.
- sethammons 14y agoA program a watched a long time ago showed researchers working with dolphins. They would draw something with a marker on the side of the dolphin, and then it would race to an underwater mirror and contort its body to view the mark. The researchers said that this demonstrated self-awareness. As for being compared to humans, meh. I donno.
- talmand 14y agoSince I did not see this program I have to ask; did they reward the dolphin in any way for performing this task?
- mmahemoff 14y agoYou also need scientific experiments in order to argue that humans are self-aware. Indeed, young humans aren't self-aware, hence Piaget's classic experiments on development to show the emegence of self-awareness. The article does allude to a couple of experiments in the article ("pass" option if they can't answer a question, self-recognition in a mirror). I agree it needs to be studied in more depth to make these assumptions and certainly to confer new rights.
- gcheong 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test
- dsrguru 14y agoWe'll always have the Matrix problem where it's hard to "prove" self-awareness in others (Descartes does a pretty shitty job), but inasmuch as we have reason to assume other humans have self-awareness, most scientists feel comfortable making the same assumption for animals that pass the mirror test and do well on metacognitive tests where they grade their own mental processes. Examples of the latter include the "pass" test described in the article as well as tests Herbert Terrace conducted in which monkeys were asked to perform various tasks and, each time, bet a number of M&Ms proportional to how confident they were in their solution. Sure enough, they tended to bet a lot on answers they got right and much less on ones they got wrong. Note that such tests, especially the mirror test, aren't bijective. If you pass the mirror test, we can be reasonably sure you're self-aware. However, if you don't pass the mirror test (which I didn't as a toddler), that doesn't mean you can't be self-aware.
- njl 14y agoI'm very comfortable with this in the general case; I feel guilty eating bacon because pigs seem pretty smart. Still, rights always come paired up with responsibilities. Do we then try dolphins for rape or murder? Rather than saying certain categories of animals should have the same rights as humans, maybe we'd be better off saying certain categories of animals deserve a higher level of ethical and legal consideration.
- sethbannon 14y agoA 10 month old has no responsibilities. Certainly, though, she has rights.
- jlgreco 14y agoA rather limited set of rights to be sure. Children, unless emancipated, lack a great deal of the rights that adults enjoy. Perhaps this is the best way to legally consider dolphins. They have approximately the same rights as human children, until any one of them decides to ask for more.
- crusso 14y agoShort of new mutations, no dolphin has ever, is, or will ever be a fully functioning member of society. Rules of thumb regarding treatment of immature or disabled humans is not at all appropriate.
- mistercow 14y ago>a fully functioning member of society What does that even mean?
- jlgreco 14y agoI don't know, but I do know that if we all accepted that as a standard we would be in a much worse off place as a society since most times I hear the phrase "fully functioning member of society" the implied alternative is usually "penniless hippy".
- mtgx 14y agoIt probably won't be long until we say the same thing about some "strong AI" robots.
- Jach 14y agoIf it's really "strong AI", whether some humans want to grant the AI "rights" or not is irrelevant. Kind of like ants deciding whether humans should get a share of the harvest.
- sethbannon 14y agoI applaud this. It's time we stop drawing the line of where rights begin and end at the species barrier and start taking a characteristics based approach. What are the characteristics of a human that lead us to say one should have rights? If other species share those characteristics, they too should be granted those rights.
- crusso 14y agoAs a species, humans agree to basic rules of conduct that form an implied Social Contract. Can any non-human species do that?
- jlgreco 14y agoCertainly a potential example from the past could perhaps be found in the social relations humans had with our close relatives. The relationships between Neanderthal and Cro-Magon is contested and ultimately largely unknown, however it seems likely there was some recognition of each other involved as something other than mere beasts.
- sleepydog 14y agoI thought the Cro-Magnons hunted down and ultimately exterminated the Neanderthals. Have there been any discoveries about their interaction?
- jlgreco 14y agoThere is some evidence of interbreeding, but more importantly, there is some evidence of cultural exchange. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cro-Magnon#Neanderthals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cro-Magnon#Neanderthals All if this tends to be very wishy-washy.
- philwelch 14y agoWell, we interbred.
- acomjean 14y agoso long and thanks for all the fish..? aquatic jerks?
- bejar37 14y agoP
- brudgers 14y agoPhilosophically related Podcast [About 15 minutes] on animal abolitionism with Gary Francione at Philosophy Bites. It contains a well reasoned critique of Peter Singer's approach to animal rights which has become mainstream. http://philosophybites.com/2012/10/gary-l-francione-on-animal-abolitionism.html http://philosophybites.com/2012/10/gary-l-francione-on-anima...
- EvaPeron 14y agoWe need to be very careful here. There are those (not myself) who would contend that a fetus is a "person", thereby implying that abortion is "murder". I disagree with that, but if we say cetaceans are "persons" than is whaling then "murder"? Are we calling the Eskimo tribes who to this day hunt whales as part of their cultural tradition "murderers"? I am all for conservation, don't get me wrong, but willy-nilly throwing around the word "person" is not helpful, it is not helpful in the debate about reproductive choice and it is not helpful in the conservation debate either. A more general idea that the more "conscious" (variously defined) an entity is, the more it should be treated humanely. That makes sense to me, and to most people I would think. But we need to figure out how to do this with getting into ethical quandaries like the ones outlined.
- natex 14y agoBe careful with this comparison. The issue with abortion as murder is "when" a fetus becomes a person, not "if."
- swombat 14y agoAre we calling the Eskimo tribes who to this day hunt whales as part of their cultural tradition "murderers"? Would you call the cannibalistic tribes who hunt neighbouring tribes and eat them in holy rituals murderers?
- EvaPeron 14y agoYes, I call cannibalistic tribes murderers (provided any still exist, hopefully not). But my point is to not rush to make simplistic categories. My attitude on these and related issues is that it is enough work, more than enough work, for me to figure out how to live my own life ethically, without spending energies casting judgements upon others. Personally, I would never hunt dolphins or whales - I don't like hunting anyway and would not do that, heck, I take insects outside when I find them inside rather than stepping on them, lol - more seriously, yes, I find this research very compelling and for these reasons the concept of harming sentient beings is very troubling to me, and would not want to hunt a dolphin or a whale any more than, say, a visitor from another planet. That said, these are still complex issues which science can inform upon, but we need also to understand that in nature, in biology, one's own species is the priority, and so the "better angels of our nature" may and hopefully do go towards wanting humane treatment for more sentient creatures, but also let's not get on a bully pulpit on sensitive and complex matters. Again, I have found it is hard enough to try and be an ethical person for oneself, without trying to be judge and jury over others. That is my only point with the Eskimo tribe reference. :-)
- vitno 14y agoSo... when dolphins gangs of male bottlenose dolphins isolate a single female and forcibly mate with her... we charge them with rape, right?
- Osmium 14y agoIt always seemed to me that our lack of consideration for these animals as "non-human persons" only serves to demonstrate a failure of empathy on our part, solely because we are unable to communicate with them. We don't know whether dolphins have a formal language yet, but we do know they can communicate with each other, and if we ever figure out a way to communicate with them too it'd probably go a long way to convincing people that they deserve rights. It's the height of arrogance to assume the humans are the only species on this planet that deserve these rights. And it's not helped by animal rights organisations, that preach that all animals deserve equal rights to humans, which is an absurdity that doesn't help their cause, since it drives more reasonable people away from the idea that some animals really do deserve these rights.
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y agoHuman rigths were created not because we believe we deserve those, but as a tool to keep the peace among us. So the sad true is that most of us don't have a strong intrinsic motivation to grant rights to animals, one of the reasons being that they are not a thread to our existence; but even if they were the impossibility of communication would make any agreement (aka mutual rights) impossible.
- tvdw 14y agoMan has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much... the wheel, New York, wars and so on... while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man... for precisely the same reason.
- hannes2000 14y ago"When you place dolphins in a situation like that they respond in exactly the same way humans do" – I doubt any human would just play along with this boring game.
- pfortuny 14y agoSociologists DO get boring when designing experiments, don't they?
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoI'd like to reference an argument presented here before when this same issue came up. Japanese harvest ships slaughter thousands of dolphins each year, in a certain bay. Some escape. Next year, more olphins return to the bay and are caught, seemingly by surprise? SO either, the escaped dolphins did not communicate the danger, were unable to communicate, or just didn't care what happened to other dolphins. In any of those cases, do we have the duty to protect the lives of dolphins? Either they are not intelligent, not communicative, or have no racial ethic that values dolphin life. Why would we?
- papsosouid 14y agoYou are making a whole lot of unfounded assumptions. Who says those that escape knew the fate of those that didn't? Who says they have a choice as to where to go? Perhaps they need to be in that area at that time because that is where their food is at that time. The options you present are not even remotely close to exhaustive, yet you hide behind their totality for your excuse to avoid considering the issue at all.
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoDolphins are among the freest creatures in the ocean, traveling vast distances in little time and pretty much independent. And I'm sure something drives them to be in that bay at that time; its just not a higher intelligence, by all the evidence. Thus the tendency to reinforce: dolphins are dumb animals. So this argument isn't 'considering the issue at all'? Then what's it about? Some other issue? Would a personal attack have been more on-point? (sarcasm)
- papsosouid 14y agoYour reply did not add anything to what you originally said. You are making the assumption that dolphins are stupid because humans manage to kill them. And then you are using that faulty assumption as a reason to excuse yourself from considering the issue.
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- bravoyankee 14y agoI believe ALL animals deserve the same rights as humans, and I treat them with the same measure of respect. I have for years.
- Randgalt 14y agoAs soon as dolphins show that they can respect my rights, I'll grant them rights.
- Evbn 14y agoNo dolphin has ever bitten and eaten anyone I know.
- unoti 14y agoDon't elephants have the same kind of self awareness? There are certainly plenty of stories of elephants helping each other...