Nonhuman Persons

2018

Amicus curiae brief in support of the Nonhuman Rights Project's efforts to secure recognition of legal personhood and rights for two chimpanzees. Philosophers Offer Support For Chimpanzee Rights Cases As Nonhuman Rights Project Seeks To Appeal To New York’s Highest Court – Experts in animal ethics, animal political theory, the philosophy of animal cognition and behavior, and the philosophy of biology urge the Court of Appeals to recognize chimpanzees Tommy and Kiko as persons – Feb. 26, 2018—New York, NY—After the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a motion for permission to appeal to the New York Court of Appeals in the cases of captive chimpanzees Tommy and Kiko, a group of prominent philosophers submitted an amicus curiae brief in support of the NhRP’s efforts to secure recognition of their clients’ legal personhood and rights. The NhRP argues in its Memorandum of Law, filed on Friday, that the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Judicial Department’s June 2017 ruling requires review by the state’s highest court, not only because it conflicts with New York’s common law habeas corpus statute and previous rulings of the Court of Appeals, the First Department, and other Appellate Departments on issues pertaining to common law personhood and habeas corpus relief, but also “based on the novelty, difficulty, importance, and effect of the legal and public policy issues raised.” Engaging directly with a core issue raised by the NhRP’s appeal—the question of who is a “person” capable of possessing any legal rights—the philosophers’ brief maintains that the First Department’s ruling “uses a number of incompatible conceptions of person which, when properly understood, are either philosophically inadequate or in fact compatible with Kiko and Tommy’s personhood.” The philosophers who authored the brief are: Kristin Andrews (York University) Gary Comstock (North Carolina State University) G.K.D. Crozier (Laurentian University) Sue Donaldson (Queen’s University) Andrew Fenton (Dalhousie University) Tyler M. John (Rutgers University) L. Syd M Johnson (Michigan Technological University) Robert C. Jones (California State University, Chico) Will Kymlicka (Queen’s University) Letitia Meynell (Dalhousie University) Nathan Nobis (Morehouse College) David Peña-Guzmán (California State University, San Francisco) James Rocha (California State University, Fresno) Bernard Rollin (Colorado State) Jeffrey Sebo (New York University) Adam Shriver (University of British Columbia) Rebecca L. Walker (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) “We submit this brief in our shared interest in ensuring a more just co-existence with other animals who live in our communities,” they write. “We strongly urge this Court, in keeping with the best philosophical standards of rational judgment and ethical standards of justice, to recognize that, as nonhuman persons, Kiko and Tommy should be granted a writ of habeas corpus and their detainers should have the burden of showing the lawful justification of their current confinement.” Tommy is a male chimpanzee whom the NhRP discovered living alone in a cage in a shed on a used trailer lot along Route 30 in Gloversville, New York. Kiko is a male chimpanzee, who, to the best of the NhRP’s knowledge, is held in captivity in a cage in a cement storefront attached to a home in a residential area in Niagara Falls, New York. The NhRP has been fighting since 2013 to free them to Save the Chimps sanctuary, where they can live with other chimpanzees in a more natural environment where their fundamental right to bodily liberty will be respected. The NhRP expects the Court to rule on its motion for permission to appeal in 6-8 weeks.

2018

In December 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a petition for a common law writ of habeas corpus in the New York State Supreme Court on behalf of Tommy, a chimpanzee living alone in a cage in a shed in rural New York. Under animal welfare laws, Tommy’s owners, the Laverys, were doing nothing illegal by keeping him in those conditions. Nonetheless, the NhRP argued that given the cognitive, social, and emotional capacities of chimpanzees, Tommy’s confinement constituted a profound wrong that demanded remedy by the courts. Soon thereafter, the NhRP filed habeas corpus petitions on behalf of Kiko, another chimpanzee housed alone in Niagara Falls, and Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees held in research facilities at Stony Brook University. Thus began the legal struggle to move these chimpanzees from captivity to a sanctuary, an effort that has led the NhRP to argue in multiple courts before multiple judges. The central point of contention has been whether Tommy, Kiko, Hercules, and Leo have legal rights. To date, no judge has been willing to issue a writ of habeas corpus on their behalf. Such a ruling would mean that these chimpanzees have rights that confinement might violate. Instead, the judges have argued that chimpanzees cannot be bearers of legal rights because they are not, and cannot be persons. In this book we argue that chimpanzees are persons because they are autonomous.

There is a growing number of objections to the possibility and the practical use of personhood and theories based on it, particularly in bioethics. Chief on this attack has been the suspicion that many in the philosophical literature have expressed about the concept of person, both in its metaphysical and moral aspects. The charges leveled against this concept by different authors from different theoretical standpoints fall into four groups which I shall first try to discriminate – in doing so, I will count the over-simplification charge, the charge of vagueness/ambiguity, the cover-up/begging the question charge, and the irrelevance/superfluousness charge (I will use Bert Gordijn’s (1999) basic formulations of the charges, subsuming under the former many other similar objections from other authors). It is my claim that we can answer all the charges in a non-problematic way, since most of these are unjustified or, at least, they could equally well be applied to many other concepts who play a fundamental role in philosophy, science, and in our own practical life. My ultimate interest, however, is not so much on the objections themselves but on showing how they all share a deeper metaphysical cum moral question - in each charge we will inevitably reach the point where the metaphysical and the moral aspects of personhood meet and that link is what will prompts us from one charge to the other, until we finally devote our full attention to the kind of connection there is or should be between metaphysical personhood and moral personhood (or, to frame it in another possible manner, the link between the descriptive and the normative aspects of the concept of person).

How much continuity is there between the social cognition of humans and other animals? To answer this question, we first need accurate descriptions of the kinds of social cognition that exist in humans, and the kinds of social cognition that exist in other animals. Offering such descriptions, it turns out, is surprisingly difficult. Nonetheless, claims of discontinuities abound. Michael Tomasello's research on the abilities of children and nonhuman great apes leads him to conclude that only humans are true cooperators, who share a joint goal and work together to achieve it (Tomasello 2014). Kim Sterelny's apprenticeship hypothesis shares such a commitment to human uniqueness in cooperation and mindreading, for these skills are what facilitate the uniquely human practice of active teaching (Sterelny 2012). Tad Zawidzki argues that the uniquely human sociocognitive syndrome, which consists of language, cooperation, imitation, and mindreading, developed due to our intrinsic motivation to shape others and be shaped by others in a way that demonstrates norm following (Zawidzki 2013). And according to Gergely Csibra and György Gergely's (2011) Natural Pedagogy Hypothesis, humans alone engage in active teaching, because humans alone have an innate mechanism that produces and responds to signals indicating that a learning opportunity is at hand. I aim to challenge the view that there are stark discontinuities between the social psychology of humans and other animals—in particular between humans and the other great apes—by downgrading the mechanisms for human social cognition. Humans often rely on a relatively simple set of mechanisms that, together with the ability to identify intentional action, permit much of our sophisticated-looking social cognitive practices. Our social cognition involves a process of model building and forming expectations of how intentional agents should live up to these models. The models include normative elements—aspirational stereotypes of how people and groups should act—rather than mere descriptions of how people do in fact act. At least some other animals also have elements of pluralistic folk psychology—something that becomes apparent when we look for the right sorts of similarities and differences. I will start this chapter by arguing that mindreading beliefs is not the place to look for continuity between human and nonhuman social cognition, because mindreading beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes is a small and late-developing piece of our social cognitive skill set.1 Next, I will argue that a better account of human social cognition is pluralistic. There are three elements to the account of Pluralistic Folk Psychology that I defend: we understand other people in a variety of ways, we build models of individual people and groups, and the models are largely prescriptive rather than descriptive. After sketching the position of pluralistic folk psychology, I will present 1 In this paper I am going to use the term " mindreading " in this narrow sense of ascribing propositional attitudes such as belief and desire to others. There is no handy term for this subset of mindreading capacity, and " mindreading propositional attitudes " is unwieldy to repeat. " Mindreading " could be used in a wider sense, too, and include ascribing mental content such as perceptions, emotions, and sensations.

Erkenntnis, 2019

The present paper unravels ontological and normative conditions of personhood for the purpose of critiquing 'Cognitivist Views'. Such views have attracted much attention and affirmation by presenting the ontology of personhood in terms of higher-order cognition on the basis of which normative practices are explained and justified. However, these normative conditions are invoked to establish the alleged ontology in the first place. When we want to know what kind of entity has full moral status, it is tempting to establish an ontology that fits our moral intuitions about who should qualify for such unique normative standing. But this approach conflates personhood's ontology and normativity insofar as it stresses the primacy of the former while implicitly presupposing the latter; it thereby suffers from a 'Normative Fallacy' by inferring from 'ought' to 'is'. Following my critique of Cognitivism, I sketch an alternative conception, contending that, whereas the Cognitivist ontology of personhood presupposes the normative, a social ontology is constituted by it. In due consideration of evidence from developmental psychology, the social embeddedness of persons—manifested in the ability of taking a 'second-person stance'—is identified as a key feature of personhood that precedes higher-order cognition, and is directly linked to basic normative concerns.

ASEBL Journal, 2019

A critical response to Shawn Thompson's "Supporting Ape Rights: Finding the Right Fit between Science and the Law"

Association for the Study of (Ethical Behavior)•(Evolutionary Biology) in Literature, 2019

This essay analyzes how the Modularity of Mind impacts the anthrozoological argument that non-human animals are persons. Comparative research on human and animal minds suggests that human and other-than-human minds differ in their mental architecture such that animal cognition is largely modular whereas human thought fluidly integrates contents across modules. If animal minds are modular, then the idea of non-human personhood is challenged. Specifically, an animal with a modularized mind would not be one person facing the world and reflecting on itself in an integral manner, but would be an individual made of many persons: The animal would experience one reality and one self pertaining to each module (or partly-integrated domain of thought) and thus “be“ one distinct person in each of these worlds. Yet, within the framework of human-animal encounters, animal personhood can be meaningfully construed despite modularity of animal minds. On this account, animal personhood is conceived by virtue of the human ability to meta-integrate mental contents: The human mind meta-integrates the animal mind's modularized experience for the animal. Thus, in human-animal interactions, humans face the animal as a functional whole, as an integral animal person.