Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6973994.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=797084

by chaostheory • 17 years ago

79 71 17 years ago

timesonline.co.uk

grellas2• 17 years ago

Marino and Reiss will present their findings at a conference in San Diego, California, next month, concluding that the new evidence about dolphin intelligence makes it morally repugnant to mistreat them.

It is morally repugnant to mistreat animals regardless of the intelligence of the animal and being a scientist has nothing to do with making such a judgment, since it is not a scientific judgment but an ethical one. Thus, the new-found evidence discussed in the article serves only to dramatize something these scientists want because of their philosophical predispositions, not because of their special knowledge as scientists. If the logic suggested in the article were true, the converse might be up for consideration as well (e.g., that we can be cruel to deer because they are so dumb).

Science and advocacy are distinct and should be kept that way. There is nothing wrong with scientists acting as advocates but, when they do so, their views as advocates should normally carry no more weight than do those of others.

DarkShikari• 17 years ago

Thus, the new-found evidence discussed in the article serves only to dramatize something these scientists want because of their philosophical predispositions,

I don't think this is entirely true here. You've loaded the question by making an assumption, "It is morally repugnant to mistreat animals regardless of the intelligence of the animal" which not everyone will agree with.

In fact, I suspect the vast majority of people do not: every day millions of people knowingly eat meat produced from animals that were horrifically mistreated, despite the fact that they could have eaten something else, often for a lower price. Why? Because it tastes good, and a lot of people don't care about the suffering of cows.

Suppose the following moral axiom that some hypothetical person might hold:

"Mistreating any sapient being is equivalently morally wrong as mistreating a human."

Therefore, if scientists can prove that an animal is sapient, those who follow such a belief will agree that such an animal should not be mistreated. I don't see the problem with scientists arguing that an animal is sapient.

NathanKP• 17 years ago

I totally agree and after reading the article I was going to post this exact same comment but you beat me to it. I would say that it is just as morally repugnant or in fact more morally repugnant to mistreat an animal that is not intelligent.

It is not like lack of intelligence makes it alright to mistreat an animal.

barrkel• 17 years ago

How well do you treat mice that have invaded your home? How about cockroaches? How do you avoid mistreating worms while doing your gardening?

itistoday2• 17 years ago

The article is not discussing the ethical question of "mistreatment", but rather that of legal rights. This is an important distinction.

Anyone can advocate for dolphin rights, but, as scientists who have done research on dolphins, they are in a position to make ethical arguments against keeping dolphins in a zoo for public entertainment.

The rationale behind these arguments are grounded firmly in science. You have to be able to show the research that proves that one animal has no sense of self, while another (a dolphin) does, etc.

CapitalistCartr• 17 years ago

"Anyone can advocate for dolphin rights, but, as scientists who have done research on dolphins, they are in a position to make ethical arguments against keeping dolphins in a zoo for public entertainment."

"The rationale behind these arguments are grounded firmly in science. You have to be able to show the research that proves that one animal has no sense of self, while another (a dolphin) does, etc."

We are all in a position to make ethical arguments; I often do. But its not science. They are obviously in a position to know more about dolphins than most, but whether we change our policies regarding them might be grounded in science (for a change), but it is not, in and of itself, science, and they aren't experts in that.

As for a sense of self, I don't treat animals humanely because they have a sense of self, but because I do.

grellas2• 17 years ago

The legal rights distinction, in my view, does not alter the basic point - ethics determines how are laws are shaped and, while science can furnish the data points, it goes no further to help us determine the ethical outcome.

For example, the researchers are said to argue that it is "morally unacceptable" for dolphins to be killed by accident by humans while fishing.

Of course, laws might be passed making it a misdemeanor to kill a dolphin accidentally in such a context and perhaps make the perpetrator pay a fine. Or they might make it a felony and impose jail time as well. Or they might say that mens rea or evil intent is a required element of the crime. Or any one of many other variations. Or the laws might simply state that there is no culpability if a human who is fishing happens to kill a dolphin.

The above represents a broad range of potential judgments on a legal issue that is ultimately an ethical question (what we ought to do) affected by a scientific truth (what is empirically verifiable) whose discoverers are in no better position than is any other intelligent person to opine. Scientists may opine but no special deference ought to be paid to their ethical judgments simply because they are scientists.

netcan3• 17 years ago

Scientists are in a position to tell us about various traits that dolphins possess, like a sense of self.

By saying that this gives this puts them in a position to make moral judgements you are implying that these traits (basically, intelligence or some flavour of it) are the basis for granting a moral consideration. That is one giant implication to just rely on without even mentioning. That is something these scientists are not in a special position to comment on.

dazzawazza• 17 years ago

The opinion of a scientist with a deep understanding of the biology of intelligence is worth more then my shallow understanding of biology.

Everyone's opinion does not have equal weight.

I agree though that no one group has a monopoly on ethics and everyone can have an opinion of some worth.

Locke16893• 17 years ago

We make moral judgements to the contrary every day. Our implicit acceptance that humans are "worth more" than other animals acknowledges both an innate desire to defend one's own species over all others, but also that a heirarchy of superiority. For example, you would object to a massacre of puppies but would not over a massacre of bacteria.

The question lies in how you decide superiority. Thr religious tend to believe that we are "made in gods image" and thus superior. I am not religious, so I define my heirarchy by the ability of the species to comprehend the universe and its disruptiveness to other species. This is probably equally arbitrary, but it has at least some logic behind it. I view knowledge of the universe as humanity's ultimate goal as a species and thus judge species based on their ability to complete said goal.

When it comes to a choice between harming another species and the alternative I make a moral judgement based on the species "intelligence". I obviously never justify senseless violence and tend to abhor any purposeful torture.

The scientists' information is thus very important to my moral system.

P.s. Sorry for any typos or similar, this is posted from an iPhone.

davepeck• 17 years ago

> I define my heirarchy by the ability of the species to comprehend the universe and its disruptiveness to other species. This is probably equally arbitrary, but it has at least some logic behind it.

I have a very similar view of the world, and when a friend tried to get me (last night!) to put it on firm logical footing, I was unable to.

Why should our ability to comprehend the universe be the yardstick by which we measure ourselves? I feel that it is a reasonable measure, but I can't give sound reasoning for it.

Somehow, I think this property (which appears to be unique to us, at least in our own biosphere) is deep in a way that, say, the ability to swim gracefully in water is not.

netcan3• 17 years ago

I think you are going backwards & trying to find rational justification for how you feel or act already.

Why is average intelligence for the species you basic qualifier? Why not intelligence of the individual?

I think we are fundamentally speciest and there is no way around it.

nudist2• 17 years ago

It's not a scientific judgement? How can you say it's OK to kill plants but not "animals," considering they are made of essentially the same thing? Where is the line?

It's fairly easy to trace the evolution of the nervous system from simple single-celled organisms to modern animals. Moral repugnance is a purely human invention.

hyperbovine4• 17 years ago

Plants and animals are made of essentially the same thing? Plants have no nervous system and absolutely no capacity for suffering. It is impossible to inflict pain on a plant. By contrast, most animals are capable of experiencing physical and even mental anguish. Once you admit this, good luck trying to build a coherent moral argument for why human suffering should be abhorrent while all other forms of animal suffering are fair game. This is "speciesism," a term introduced by the philosopher Peter Singer in his famous book Animal Liberation. I have never read a convincing refutation of the argument therein.

There is a line. It simply requires some thought to elucidate it.

pkulak• 17 years ago

The ethics of mistreatment are tied to inteligence of the species, however. Stepping on an ant, or cutting down a tree is not the same as killing an animal. Who knows where the lines are, but the distinctions exist.

miles• 17 years ago

"What is it that should trace the insuperable line? ...The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" -- Jeremy Bentham

amichail• 17 years ago

Are dolphins intelligent in a different way than chimps?

This is an example of somewhat parallel evolution after all.

andrewljohnson• 17 years ago

The article is interesting and has lots of actual facts about dolphin neurology that kept me reading.

I could do without the political crusade though.

rms4• 17 years ago

I strongly recommend the movie The Cove. It's much more entertaining and less depressing than you would expect. Available via DVD or bittorrent. http://www.thecovemovie.com/ (flash site so I can't link directly to the trailer)

pmichaud• 17 years ago

The movie is actually quite depressing, but I was happy to find out after watching that the practice has, at least temporarily, stopped.

rms4• 17 years ago

Yeah, I know, my point is that there is less footage of dolphins being killed than most people expect after hearing the description.

And yes, it's absolutely amazing that an activist film such as this worked. How often has that happened in the history of documentary filmmaking? I think it's a shoe-in for the best documentary Academy Award this year.

elblanco8• 17 years ago

Good, we should then start making them liable for violations of laws as well. Dolphin researchers know for example that some dolphins like to form gangs and go around harassing other dolphins and forcing themselves sexually on female dolphins. Should we also send out the police patrol and lock them up?

jacquesm9• 17 years ago

No, you should leave that to the Dolphin police.

To force human norms and laws on Dolphins would be to anthropomorphize (sp?) and that is exactly what the article warns against.

If you start of from the assumption they are non-human persons then you'll have to admit to their right to self govern their society.

elblanco8• 17 years ago

What about when dolphins violate human laws? Like breaking undersea cables or eating fish hauls still in net, or attacking a human or some other such violation?

This would seem to be most closely analogous to an international border violation.

ugh2• 17 years ago

I realize that this is supposed to be a joke, but there is an answer to your question and it is (of course) no.

Our law could easily deal with dolphins that enjoy human rights protection. Babies are given the full protection of human rights, yet they cannot vote, cannot drive and cannot be made responsible for any crime they may commit. Why not give certain animals a similar status?

jerf2• 17 years ago

Rights come with obligations; those who can't discharge those obligations get their rights taken from them. That's not a moral statement, either; that's a descriptive statement of what the current situation is. That is the way it is because it must be that way. Rights are, ultimately, the power to draw on the resources of others in the society (even "the right to free speech" is nothing more and nothing less than the right to draw on the resources of the society to defend your free speech), and for every such draw there must be a corresponding obligation or your putative "right" will draw against a non-existent account. While we like to think about the positive side of "rights", without the corresponding obligations they literally don't exist; phantoms tools that appear to exist right up to the moment when you pick one up whereupon it is revealed to be a trick of the light.

Babies are lent their basic rights against their future obligations, and the difference is made up by their parents. Babies and children are extended fewer rights because of their decreased ability to service the resulting obligations, too, so your example isn't even all that great as children's rights are necessarily quite curtailed.

Certainly our law could easily deal with obligationless-psuedorights enjoyed by animals, but our society can not deal with them having true rights. Dolphins can be extended unilateral protection, but they can't have actual rights until they can also discharge the resulting obligations.

Some would define "right" to include this sort of "unilateral protection" but I think that strips us of a valuable word, and encourages category errors as what are "unilateral protections" one minute silently get upgraded to "rights" (as I have defined them) the next. I am quite certain this is considered desirable by animal "rights" advocate, even if they are not consciously using this exact line of thought. I'm fairly confident that if you asked, animal rights activists would not care to be classified as animal-"unilateral protection" advocates.

(Moreover, giving dolphins rights would just be an open invitation to yet more corruption, in the form of "legal representatives" of the en-righted animals suing in the legal system for some recompense or other which oh-so-coincidentally will go back in the pockets of the representatives. If we're really lucky we'll set up a parallel "animal's right court" so the whole system can be set up as a rent-extraction racket. There is in fact an upper limit on how much of this sort of corruption we can tolerate as a society.)

(Applying my definition of "right" to the current discussion of a "health-care right" is an interesting exercise left to the reader. For every right, the question of "where's the corresponding obligation?" must be answered.)

elblanco8• 17 years ago

> Why not give certain animals a similar status?

I think that we do don't we? What this appears to be raising is a new category or rights, between humans and animals. The ethical considerations for this will most likely also be new.

Yes it was a bit tongue in cheek, but I was also semi-serious. If we are to consider dolphins and great apes and such as something in that category, and provide them with an abridged set of rights (I think human infants is not a good, model, more like human children under 18), then we should also expect a certain level of lawfulness to go along with that.

How to make those laws? Should we start electing dolphins and great apes to congress? Unless we also figure out uplift (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_uplift) then probably not. But perhaps that limitation can also help guide us as to how to craft appropriate rights recognition and lawful behavior for these creatures.

I'm not against this kind of recognition per se, just that I think we have to really think carefully through it. Rights are not typically given out without some level of responsibility to go along with it.

hyperbovine4• 17 years ago

You are totally correct. This is known as "argument from marginal cases" and the contortions people must enter to get around your argument are frequently hilarious. See http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/10/magazine/an-animal-s-place...

JulianMorrison3• 17 years ago

I'm far from convinced. On the one hand, their shape and their environment explains why they never copied the concept of technology from us. On the other, it does nothing to prevent them having art, literature, math, or creating a pidgin and talking to us. And on the third hand, we anatomically modern humans spent our first 150,000 years doing essentially sod all, so we can hardly complain.

I would want evidence of bidirectional conversation before calling them "people". Otherwise, I think they're "almost-people". Maybe near-future science can uplift them the rest of the way.

jacquesm9• 17 years ago

By your standards plenty of disabled people would not qualify as people.

JulianMorrison3• 17 years ago

Absolutely the opposite - disabled people are a perfect illustration of why humans are definitely "people". We work around our difficulties. Can't hear? Use sign language. Can't speak? Write it down.

Human minds in dolphin bodies would quickly work out similar hacks. The fact that dolphins don't is what makes it hard to qualify them as people.

jacquesm9• 17 years ago

Personally I think it would be great if humans started treating other humans categorically in an ethical way.

That's a ways off I'm afraid though. It's important to see that these are obviously non-related issues but I don't have much hopes for our stance towards Dolphins as long as we haven't learned to do this with each other.

brl2• 17 years ago

To me this is quite obviously a very related issue.

As long as people refuse to recognize the moral interests of animals, it is not logically consistent for them to respect moral obligations to other humans. The moral distinction between animals and humans is a completely arbitrary prejudice and should be immediately identified as such by anybody with even a basic understanding of evolutionary biology.

Humans are animals.

jacquesm9• 17 years ago

> Humans are animals.

I wished that was a universally accepted truth, alas that is very much not the case (not in the least in the US).

Somehow we seem to have gotten it in to our heads that we are special instead of simply evolved.

And then there are subsets of all humans that think that they in turn are even more special. Go figure...

Devilboy• 17 years ago

I would think Bonobos are first in line for 'non human personhood'

cabalamat• 17 years ago

Why can't cats be persons? They certainly have personalities. And they can recognise themselves in mirrors; at least, my cat reacts differently to seeing himself than he would do to another cat.

They are also a lot cuter than dolphins.

elblanco8• 17 years ago

Why not? We've tried to abuse test like IQ and apply them to dolphins and apes and such. Dogs and cats also seem to have a measurable IQ and they certainly have personalities and emotions. And outside of a few notable areas, eating any of these animals is generally considered taboo.

kingkawn2• 17 years ago

Reminders me of this time article about whales:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12whales-t.html

An elegant piece on them.

kingkawn2• 17 years ago

Does non-human person make them better than us?

scotty79• 17 years ago

Finding about dolphins not mentioned in article:

Dolphins have names in dolphin speech. Sequence of sounds unique for each dolphin by uttering which other dolphins that know him might call him.

kaitnieks• 17 years ago

We certainly don't need to fear that dolphins could try to dominate or exterminate us. So why bother treating them in any special way? The reason for morale and ethics is to maintain society and minimize risk of revenge. In case of dolphins there's hardly a society, the risk of revenge is none. To keep natural balance we should restrain ourselves from killing them all off or domesticating all of them and that's it.

Maybe this is too brutal opinion for modern times but I think people have gone too far in their foolishness. We should remember our real place and our real power, so that we can learn to use it more responsibly, instead of playing silly Ramen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concepts_in_the_Ender%27s_Game_...) games out of the boredom.

rms4• 17 years ago

It's an emotional argument, not a logical argument.

Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'

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