immanence

Posted in EcoCulture | Tagged animals | 8 Comments

8 Responses

1. on January 4, 2010 at 5:07 am | Reply johan

   Dolphins say scientists should be treated as ‘impersonal humans’

   
   
2. on January 4, 2010 at 9:56 am | Reply Gavan Watson

   A nice move and a good beginning, no doubt; engaging ethically with these organisms is very important. I do have problems with simply expanding concepts of personhood outwards from us as a centre—we include dolphins & the great apes because they are like us.

   What about the organisms that escape our ability to capture or understand their intelligence? Ethical engagement with the non-human might need a more multi-centric approach.

   
   
3. on January 4, 2010 at 6:00 pm | Reply kvond

   I’m trying to track down the titular ethics claim for dolphin person rights, and its sees to lie in this:

   “Thomas White, professor of ethics at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, who has written a series of academic studies suggesting dolphins should have rights, will speak at the same conference.

   “Thomas White, professor of ethics at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, who has written a series of academic studies suggesting dolphins should have rights, will speak at the same conference.

   The scientific research . . . suggests that dolphins are ‘non-human persons’ who qualify for moral standing as individuals,” he said.”

   If anyone has a copy of any of these ethics studies of Thomas White, please email them to me at kvdi@earthlink.net , if I can ask.

   
   
4. on January 4, 2010 at 7:49 pm | Reply adrian

   kvond – The article suggests several comparative standards for assessing moral considerability of an organism, including its ‘intelligence’ (‘higher’, ‘more complex’), its brain size relative to body mass, its possession of ‘culture,’ etc. White is an ethicist and author of In Defense of Dolphins: The New Moral Frontier (Blackwell), among other books. An overview of that book is here. I’m not familiar with his arguments (beyond scanning this piece), but the animal ethics/liberation literature includes arguments from a broad range of positions from Kantians and utilitarians to feminists, phenomenologists, Deleuzians, et al. There’s certainly room for more Spinozan insights…

   Gavan – Your suggestion dovetails well with Anthony Weston’s multicentrist ethics manifesto, a version of which appears here.

   Johan – I like your implicit suggestion that dolphins might acknowledge a difference between scientific “impersonality” and the (presumably more normal) human capacity for empathy, etc. The struggle for a more compassionate science has been waged both in popular culture (where both Dr. Frankenstein scientists and the Jane Goodalls and Dian Fosseys of the world are both well known) and in science itself (by cognitive ethologists like Marc Bekoff and others). I cheer when I see signs that the scientific norm is changing for the better.

   
   
5. on January 5, 2010 at 2:16 pm | Reply kvond

   Yes, Adrian, I could guess at all the arguments towards “personhood” for instance a kind of criteria listing. It is only that the use of “person” is a particular kind of distinction, and I am curious how it is handled. From a Spinozist point of view and assertion of “right” would not rely upon the notion of personhood, I would have to say, since right is anything that you have the power to do, and moral obligation comes from simply sharing powers of freedom to a maximal limit. I’ll check out his book.

   
   
6. on January 9, 2010 at 12:51 pm | Reply Smelly Brain

   First we try to understand animals in a way that we are better suitable to kill them later on? The past has learned us that we are not so careful in taking care for animals that are almost extinct. It would be best if scientists would never publish anything they find out because the wrong people will always take profit from it.

   
   
7. on March 15, 2010 at 11:50 am | Reply Daphne

   But Adrian, is the taboo lifting on anthropomorphism a good thing? Isn’t it a little self-absorbed to think that personhood is appropriate or even desired by non-humans?

   
   
8. on March 15, 2010 at 12:17 pm | Reply adrian

   Daphne – ‘Personhood’ is a complex social idea, one that gets negotiated differently in different societies. All social animals relate to (at least some) social animals socially, which means according to certain behavioral habits and rules that are understood to apply to social relations. (Think of wolves in a wolf pack, cats in your neighborhood, etc.)

   The scientific taboo against anthropomorphism has been too heavy-handed, and one of its effects has been to make it difficult to recognize commonalities between humans and nonhumans. Lifting that taboo doesn’t mean that we see other species as identical to us in every way (personhood, the right to vote, etc.); it just means that we can be more attuned to differences *and* similarities.