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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
I think that we do don't we? What this appears to be raising is a new category or rights, between humans and animals. The ethical considerations for this will most likely also be new.
Yes it was a bit tongue in cheek, but I was also semi-serious. If we are to consider dolphins and great apes and such as something in that category, and provide them with an abridged set of rights (I think human infants is not a good, model, more like human children under 18), then we should also expect a certain level of lawfulness to go along with that.
How to make those laws? Should we start electing dolphins and great apes to congress? Unless we also figure out uplift (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_uplift) then probably not. But perhaps that limitation can also help guide us as to how to craft appropriate rights recognition and lawful behavior for these creatures.
I'm not against this kind of recognition per se, just that I think we have to really think carefully through it. Rights are not typically given out without some level of responsibility to go along with it.
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.)
Right, I was speaking a bit tongue in cheek, but I think you got the gist of my point. Since we cannot communicate with these animals in such a fashion as to learn their intent beyond the most basic needs (hungry, angry, sleepy) if that, granting rights without obligations to self-service those rights seems inappropriate beyond the rights we already grant any other animal.
Granting those rights would assume that there is some type of obligant who could service those rights, and those would almost certainly be people. Thus this opens up a fascinating thought experiment of parallel non-human persons rights courts and legal systems....imagine a stuffy wood paneled court room with a couple of water tanks, where the lawyers argue their cases for clients that could not possibly participate of understand what was going on. This opens the situation up for massive exploitation by the people taking on the roles of non-human person obligants.
Well, a nice definition of rights, but also one I don’t share. In my mind rights don’t come with obligations, and I would argue that many (for example) constitutions share that definition with me. (I know the German one does. It’s less clear with the US constitution but in context I would say it does – you know, all the talk about inalienable rights and stuff.) It’s kinda pointless to argue about definitions so I’ll stop here.
It's not a definitional matter. You can't have a right if nobody is obligated to honor it. Someone can walk up to you and say you have the right to free speech, but if in fact you say something the government doesn't like, you get tossed in jail, and nobody defends you, including the government, then you don't have the right to free speech, no matter how much you are told you do.
Mistaking being told you have rights for actually having rights is extraordinarily dangerous. An amazing number of so-called "rights" enshrined in Constitutions around the world are of this nature, and it's both sad and funny when somebody waves around, say, the Chinese constitution [1] and claims that it actually means that the Chinese have free speech (article 35) or freedom of religious belief (article 36), both of which are transparently false. People have died or been imprisoned for life for making that mistake. You may have the "right", but nobody has the obligations... so you in fact do not have the right. Just words.
(One of the great innovations of the Anglo-Saxon legal system was not just saying the word "right", but taking it seriously. Many countries around the world have learned how to say the word "right", far fewer have actually discovered how to follow up on it.)
