“Beings who recognize themselves as ‘I’s.’
Those are persons.” That was the view of Immanuel Kant,
said Lori Gruen,
a philosophy professor at Wesleyan University who thinks and writes often about
nonhuman animals and the moral and philosophical issues involved in how we
treat them.
She was responding to questions in
an interview last week after advocates used a new legal
strategy to have chimpanzees recognized as legal persons, with a
right to liberty, albeit a liberty with considerable limits.
The Nonhuman Rights Project, an advocacy group led by
Steven M. Wise, filed writs of habeas corpus in New York last
week on behalf of four captive chimpanzees: Tommy, owned by a Gloversville
couple; two at Stony Brook University; and one at the Primate Sanctuary in Niagara Falls. The lawsuits
were dismissed, but Mr. Wise said he planned to appeal.
He believes that the historical use
of habeas
corpus lawsuits as a tool against human slavery offers a model for
how to fight for legal rights for nonhumans.
His case relies heavily on science. Nine affidavits from scientists that were part of
the court filings offer opinions of what research says about the lives,
thinking ability and self-awareness of chimpanzees.
Mr. Wise argues that chimps are
enough like humans that they should have some legal rights; not the right to
vote or freedom of religion — he is not aiming for a full-blown planet of the
apes — but a limited right to bodily liberty. The suits asked that the chimps
be freed to go to sanctuaries where they would have more freedom.
Richard L. Cupp, a law professor at
Pepperdine University in California who opposes granting rights to nonhuman
animals, described the legal strategy as “far outside the mainstream.” He said
in an email, “The courts would have to dramatically expand existing common law
for the cases to succeed.”
Lori Marino of Emory University, who studies
dolphins and other cetaceans and
is the science director of the Nonhuman Rights Project, said it “is about more
than these four chimpanzees.” Mr. Wise, she said, “sees this as the knob that
can turn a lot of things. It’s potentially transformative.”
She said she was under no illusion
that rights for animals would be easy to gain. “It may not happen in anyone’s
lifetime,” she said.
The science of behavior is only part
of the legal argument, though it is crucial to the central idea — that chimps
are in some sense autonomous. Autonomy can mean different things, depending on
whether you are talking about chimpanzees, drones or robot vacuum cleaners, and
whether you are using the language of law, philosophy or artificial
intelligence.
Dr. Gruen sees it as a term that is
fraught with problems in philosophy, but Dr. Marino said that for the purposes
of the legal effort, autonomy means “a very basic capacity to be aware of
yourself, your circumstances and your future.”
Science can’t be decisive in such an
argument, as Dr. Gruen points out, but what it can do is support or undermine
this idea of autonomy. “If you form the right kinds of questions,” she said,
“there are important answers that science can give about animal cognition and
animal behavior.”
Dr. Marino said that science could
“contribute evidence for the kinds of characteristics that a judge may find to
be part of autonomy.”
Dr. Gruen, Dr. Marino and Mr. Wise
made presentations at a conference, Personhood Beyond the Human, at Yale over the
weekend. They spoke in interviews related to the court case during the week
before the conference.
The kind of science that supports
the idea of chimpanzees as autonomous could also support the idea that many
other animals fit the bill. There are affidavits related to cognitive ability,
tool use, social life and many other capabilities of chimpanzees, but there are
questions about how pertinent each line of evidence is.
“Is that important for being a
philosophical person — tool use itself?” Dr. Gruen asked.
The issues of self-awareness and of
awareness of past and future strike to the heart of a common-sense view of what
personhood might be. Chimps, elephants and some cetaceans have shown that they
can recognize themselves in a mirror.
But the rights project is claiming
more, saying that for chimps, as Dr. Marino put it, “you know it was you
yesterday, you today, you tomorrow,” and “you have desires and goals for the
future.”
There is plenty of evidence that
chimpanzees and other animals act for the future. Some birds hide seeds to
recover in leaner times, for example.
One affidavit is from Matthias
Osvath, of Lund University in Sweden, who studies the thinking
ability of animals, particularly great apes and some birds. He cites a number
of studies of chimps that support the idea they have a sense of the future,
including resisting an immediate reward to gain a tool that will get them a
larger reward.
In one well-known piece of research by Dr. Osvath, he
reported on Santino, a chimp at a zoo in Sweden who stockpiled and hid rocks he
would later throw at human visitors. Dr. Osvath argued that Santino had the
capacity to think of himself making future use of the rocks he saved.
Science cannot prove what went on in
Santino’s mind. But Dr. Marino said the cumulative evidence could be used to
ask a judge, “If you look at all the evidence in total, then what kind of being
could produce all that evidence?”
Not all proponents of animal welfare
are convinced that calling for rights for animals is the best way to go.
Dr. Gruen said that she had
misgivings about the rights approach, philosophically and politically. “My own
view is that it makes more sense to think about what we owe animals.” Progress on that front in 2013, particularly for
chimpanzees, has surprised and delighted many activists. The National
Institutes of Health is retiring most of
its chimpanzees. And the United States Fish and Wildlife Service has
proposed changes that
would classify all chimps, even those in laboratories, as
endangered, a move that would raise obstacles to experiments on privately owned
chimps.
One point to remember is that
personhood does not mean being human. Robert Sapolsky, a primatologist and neuroscientist
at Stanford University who was not associated with the lawsuit, said, “I think
the evidence certainly suggests that chimps are self-aware and autonomous.”
That still leaves a vast gap between chimps and humans, he said. Chimps may
look ahead in hiding food for later, or planning “how to ambush monkeys they
are hunting.” Humans, he noted, could think about “the consequences of global
warming for their grandchildren’s grandchildren, or of the sun eventually
dying, or of them eventually dying.”
James Gorman (New York Times)
