THE ZERO-SUM GAME: Human and animal personhood need not be at loggerheads
Many humans in many jurisdictions around the world believe that extending legal personhood to animals seems at best premature, and, at worst, a frivolous distraction from the urgent need to secure rights for all humans.
PETER MCKNIGHT: Just in case you were wondering, Swiss chimpanzees aren’t people. They might have been, mind you, but voters in Basel City, Switzerland, last week turned down a measure to recognize the legal personhood of non-human primates, thereby keeping the people club limited to humans. Well, not quite.
The Swiss, like most of the world, have already extended legal personhood to certain non-humans, such as corporations and ships. And various jurisdictions have also recognized sacred scriptures, mountains, and rivers as persons. In fact, one year ago this week, the municipality of Minganie and the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit granted personhood to Quebec’s Magpie (Muteshekau-shipu) River…
So animals are now lawyering up and making their way into courtrooms around the globe. And they’ve been enjoying some conspicuous success: In Argentina in 2017, for example, a chimpanzee named Cecilia was granted legal personhood, thereby ensuring that she be removed from captivity and placed in a sanctuary. Similarly, in 2020, a court in Pakistan ordered an elephant named Kaavan be released from captivity in the Islamabad Zoo and transferred to a sanctuary.
Closer to home, the Florida-based Nonhuman Rights Project advocates legal recognition of personhood in animals for which there is evidence of autonomy and self-awareness — currently, great apes, elephants, dolphins and whales. The project, too, has had uncommon success, in that it has brought cases resulting in the world’s first habeas corpus hearings on behalf of animals. And last year, the influential New York Court of Appeals agreed to hear the habeas corpus case concerning Happy, an unhappy elephant held in the Bronx Zoo…
That has some humans a little concerned, what with the fact that the fight for human rights is by no means over. Many humans in many jurisdictions around the world remain dispossessed of the rights of persons, so extending legal personhood to animals seems at best premature, and, at worst, a frivolous distraction from the urgent need to secure rights for all humans. But human and animal personhood need not be at loggerheads, and the fight to secure both is one fight, not two, let alone two at war with each other…
Critics like late English philosopher Roger Scruton argue that the concept of animal personhood is fundamentally misguided, in large part because rights imply obligations, and animals can’t assume obligations… Yet there are also humans who can’t assume obligations — every infant, for example, and some people with severe cognitive or intellectual disabilities. So what makes them persons?
One could respond that being human is both necessary and sufficient for personhood, but that’s a conclusion not an argument — it suggests, without justification, that humans are morally more important than other animal species. Psychologist Richard Ryder described this attitude as “speciesism”..
In the absence of arguments for the moral superiority of Homo sapiens, we arrive at the inescapable conclusion that if no animals are persons, then neither are some humans. And this is no mere academic exercise… We have seen regimes around the world justify euthanizing humans with disabilities precisely because they didn’t qualify as legal persons. And we can’t counter such thinking, or such actions, by denying rights… Since personhood is not a limited resource, we need not worry about recognizing it in others. There’s enough of it to go around. SOURCE…
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