Animals as Persons: The Very Idea (original) (raw)

Personhood and animals: three approaches

Environmental Ethics

A common Western assumption is that animals cannot be persons. Even in animal ethics, the concept of personhood is often avoided. At the same time, many in cognitive ethology argue that animals do have minds, and that animal ethics presents convincing arguments supporting the individual value of animals. Although "animal personhood" may seem to be an absurd notion, more attention needs to placed on the reasons why animals can or cannot be included in the category of persons. Of three different approaches to personhood-the perfectionist approach, the humanistic approach, and the interactive approach-the third approach is the strongest. Personhood defined via interaction opens new doors for animal ethics.

What is an Animal: Learning from the Past – Looking to the Future

Society Register, 2020

Can western human society apply its definition of the term "animal" on itself? Is it possible that a "person" is not only human? In this article, I explore and analyze various and interdisciplinary doctrines and approaches towards nonhuman animals in order to question the current status-quo regarding nonhuman animals. Throughout history, as Man developed self-awareness and the ability to empathize with others, hunters were associated with wolves and began to domesticate them and other animals. With the introduction of different religions and beliefs into human society, Man was given the lead in the food chain, and the status of the nonhuman animals became objectified and subject of the property of human animals. Common modern taxonomy identified and described approximately 1.9 million different species. Some estimate the total number of species on earth in 8.7 million. The Human is just one of 5,416 other species in the Mammal class and shares a place of honour among hundreds of other Primates and Great Apes. It appears to be commonly and scientifically accepted that humans are animals. Humans, as other nonhuman animals, all meet the definitions of the term. However, it seems that there is a wide gap between the human-generated definitions (HGDs) and the human social practice that created a distinct line between humans and "animals". This alienation is best illustrated by the commonly mistaken equivalence between the terms "human" and "person", as at least some nonhuman animals answer to many other HGDs. In this article I try to show that a rational and logical interpretation of these definitions' nonhuman animals (at least some), should be regarded as persons and to suggest an approach to implement in the future.

Are Animals Persons?

It is orthodox to suppose that very few, if any, nonhuman animals are persons. The category of the person is restricted to self-aware creatures: in effect humans (above a certain age) and possibly some of the great apes and cetaceans. I shall argue that this orthodoxy should be rejected, because it rests on a mistaken conception of the kind of self-awareness relevant to personhood. Replacing this with a sense of self-awareness that is relevant requires us to accept that personhood is much more widely distributed through the animal kingdom.

Whom Would Animals Designate as “Persons”?

Journal of Ethics and Emerging Technologies

Humans are animals; humans are machines. The current academic and popular dialogue on extending the personhood boundary to certain non-human animal species and at the same time to machines/robots reflects a dialectic about how “being human” is defined, about how we perceive our species and ourselves in relation to the environment. While both paths have the potential to improve lives, these improvements differ in substance and in consequence. One route has the potential to broaden the anthropocentric focus within the West and honor interdependence with life systems, while the other affords greater currency to a human-purpose-driven worldview–furthering an unchecked Anthropocene. The broadening of legal personhood rights to life systems is underway with a ruling for dolphins in India, for a river in New Zealand and with Laws of the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia. Many philosophers, ethicists, and ethologists define personhood within the confines of the dominant anthropocentric par...

2021. Animal Personhood: The Quest for Recognition

Animal & Natural Resource Law Review, 2021

macaRena monTes fRanceschInI * introduction Courts around the world have discussed nonhuman animal 1 personhood in different types of procedures. This paper examines twentyseven such cases, most of which are writs of habeas corpus (HCW) filed on behalf of specific animals incarcerated in a zoo or laboratory in the hope that a court will find that the animal's imprisonment is unlawful and order their transfer or release. To date, there has only been one successful HCW case, regarding a chimpanzee named Cecilia in Argentina. 2 Cecilia lived alone in a concrete cage at the notorious Mendoza Zoo for many years, until, following her trial, a court ordered her transfer to Brazil's Great Ape Sanctuary, where Cecilia currently resides with other chimpanzees. 3 The remaining legal cases this paper will discuss are either administrative, criminal, or copyright proceedings in nature, where the topic of an animal's legal personhood has been an issue. This paper examines the arguments for legal personhood that have been employed in court, teases out the trends that emerge from this historical analysis, and presents the reader with three difficult dilemmas. The first argument pertains to the pros and cons of employing legal or political means; the second argument examines the relative advantages * Macarena Montes Franceschini is an attorney and a predoctoral researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). She is a member of the UPF-Centre for Animal Ethics, a member of the Editorial Committee of the Chilean Journal of Animal Law, and the treasurer of the Great Ape Project-Spain. She has written several articles on nonhuman animal personhood and animal law and a book titled Animal Law in Chile. The author would like to thank Randy Abate, Paula Casal, Carlos Contreras, Maggie Livingston, and Steve Wise for their valuable help and comments, and the entire editorial team at MSU ANRLR for their hard work on this article.

Whom Would Animals Designate as "Persons": On the Avoidance of Anthropocentrism and the Inclusion of Others

The Question of Animal Selves

Qualitative Sociology Review , 2007

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Whom Would Animals Designate as “ Persons ” ? On Avoiding Anthropocentrism and Including Others

2014

Animals are agents Commentary on Rowlands on Animal Personhood

Mark Rowlands's (2016) target article invites us to consider individuals in a broad subset of the non-human animal world as genuine persons. His account features animals reacting to salient environmental stimuli as Gibsonian affordances, which is indicative of " pre-reflective self-awareness. " He holds that such pre-reflective self-awareness is both " immune to error through misidentification " (Shoemaker, 1968) and a necessary precursor to reflective consciousness and personhood. I agree. In this commentary I hope to extend Rowlands's work with a view in which agency is an even more fundamental precursor and one can (and should) consider individuals throughout the entire animal kingdom as agents.

Animals as Persons: The Very Idea (original) (raw)

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