It's a tough issue because our survival is at stake. If killing animals is morally wrong, a lot of people are going to die if we decide to act moral.

Im sorry to hear that your mother was treated so cruelly.

such unnecessary hostility

He has some level of paranoia, and definitely a mental disorder.

you shouldn't talk about yourself, although it does explain your hate for Obama.

This post was edited by card_sultan on Oct 13 2014 07:02pm

Animals are not moral agents, it's pretty ridiculous to even be having this discussion.

This was referenced in the article. Just wanted to put that out there.

Currently, in our legal system, these are the two categorizations of items. Either an item is a person, or an item is a thing. There is no legal description for a non-person non-thing. Therefore, under current law, Tommy the chimp is a thing.

The article mentions autonomy, despite the legal definition not mentioning it. That's because a being capable of having rights and capable of being charged with duties has been determined to necessarily be autonomous--that is, able to be self-governing and self-determining. But is this the only qualification necessary to determine someone a person? And just because something is physical capable of having rights and being charged with duties, does that mean it is worthy of personhood? In order to approach this, I would like to narrow down the scope of the question to one directly related to the article:

Are animals (pets) a thing?

In order to have personhood, something must demonstrate three qualities: autonomy, rights, and duties (per the previous discussion of the article and various legal sources).



Essentially, RIGHTS are, as Zecharia Chafee so put it, the ability not to get socked in the face ("Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins"). Rights like the right to avoid cruel and unusual punishment. Animals also qualify as having laws that defend them from cruel and torturous punishment, like humans do. So that's a right--check one off the list. But what is this stuff about duty?



With humans, the right to not be tortured rests comfortably within the DUTY of not torturing others. This is because humans are understood to be autonomous moral agents, capable of rationalization and decision making. But animals, generally speaking, are not given that same expectation.

If an animal tortures another animal or mistreats another animal, the offending animal is not put in jail. It is not put on trial. Sometimes it is segregated. If it kills a human, often times it is put down not as a punishment for its actions, but as a precaution against future incidents. Thus, animals can be said to not have a duty to avoid cruel treatment to other animals. This duty rests upon the shoulders of others, those that are granted personhood under the law.

But let's pretend, for a moment, that animals do have duties. Let's pretend that the punishment for manslaughter applies to animals, and as such grants them the status (legally) of having a duty to not kill humans. Let's take a look at whether animals have autonomy or not, and what that means for the argument of personhood...

...in my next post.

Humans are moral agents, so yes some animals are moral agents.

I agree that non-human animals are not moral agents (yet) and that the legal rights of autonomy should not apply to them, but further into OP the discussion turns to whether non-human animals ought to be legally considered moral ends; I think the obvious answer is yes. But then this turns to animal cruelty laws and not laws regarding autonomy and personhood.

So no, non-human animals should not have legal personhood, but they should still be treated as moral ends to almost the same extent as humans. Autonomy is irrelevant.



Indeed, which is why I think we have a moral obligation to minimize suffering caused by predators in the wild, because non-human animals are not capable of moral agency. This of course would require a radical ecosystemic overhaul which is a few decades a way technologically, but is feasible.

Are animals (pets) a thing? -c-

Last post I took a brief look at rights and duties. This post I'll look at the other major qualification for the argument of personhood--autonomy.



Clearly what we want is the second part: the right and condition of self-government. I think you'd have a difficult time convincing anybody that animals do not have the capability of self-government. They are able to control their own actions, able to fend for themselves and exist outside of human control, and in general can be said to be in a position of self-government. Autonomy is (in my opinion) a necessary but insufficient qualification for a being's capability of having and maintaining a legal duty. If one is unable to govern one's own actions, one is unable to be said to be responsible for those actions. Is a gun responsible for murder? No, it is the man (person) who uses the gun (thing) that is responsible. Similarly, the mentally insane are deemed unable to govern their own actions and act as moral agents, and as such are not convicted as a legal person, but rather deemed unable to carry out a duty (and thus, by extension, to be "things"). The parallel between a mentally damaged human and an animal is an interesting consideration within the grounds of non-human personhood, but outside of my considerations at present.

I think that it is more than fair to deem animals to be autonomous. But if autonomy were the only necessary state for personhood, this could lead to a wide variety of other things becoming persons. Namely, software, robots, artificial intelligence, and other computer programs. This is addressed in the article, briefly, but I'd like to expand upon it.

Consider a basic chess program. This chess program does not take the same steps every time it plays. Rather, it has the ability to adapt based on what it sees. It has the ability to make its own decisions with regards to actions and plays based on input from a user (moves). The program is, itself, responsible for these decisions in play, similar to the way a human is responsible for the choices they make when playing chess. And in the same way a human can be said to be self-governing while playing chess, a (dynamic) computer program can also be said to be self-governing while playing chess.

I understand this relies pretty heavily on a deterministic model for human action, as opposed to free will, which this example program cannot have. Programs can be "given" "free will" in a variety of manners, including relying on random number generation to determine actions. This functions the same way as theoretical human free will, in which a choice is made in a manner that cannot be deterministicly predicted (which is a necessary qualification for a good RNG protocol). More complexity in the code (and more complexity than I care to attempt to explain for the purpose of this thread) results in decision-making that is much closer to "free will" than the basic example I gave, such as strong learning algorithms and advanced AI.

But at the very least, under a deterministic model, it's pretty easy to see how silly it would be if Clipit had legal personhood.

How can an animal be a moral agent? Utilitarian's conceive of animals as moral agents because they avoid suffering we don't really think of moral agency as avoidance of suffering.