Are killer whales persons?

http://www.salon.com/2015/06/27/are_killer_whales_persons_the_more_we_learn_about_orcas_the_more_our_assumption_of_innate_superiority_looks_like_a_presumption/

by noondip • 11 years ago

43 61 11 years ago

salon.com

yarrel• 11 years ago

If they are, I demand my own tank and as much fish as I can eat.

bshimmin• 11 years ago

The advertising on this was so obnoxious (a 5 second video popup that I couldn't dismiss) that I was just left with Betteridge's law of headlines here.

goblin89• 11 years ago

Intercepted echolocation data could generate objects that are experienced in more nearly the same way by different individuals than ever occurs in communal human experiences when we are passive observers of the same external environment. Since the data are in the auditory domain, the “objects” they generate would be as real as human seen-objects than heard “objects,” that are so difficult for us to imagine. They could be vivid natural objects in a dolphin’s world.

Not directly related to the personhood question, but for me it was the highlight.

crazy1van• 11 years ago

"Can an animal be a person?"

According to the definition, a "person" refers to a human [0][1]. Perhaps the better question is should we treat the whales better or differently based on what we learned rather than shoe-horn them into a word that literally means human.

[0] Oxford English: "A human being regarded as an individual" [1] Merriam-Webster: "a human being"

meric• 11 years ago

I think saying a human being can be called a "person" - meaning rational agent, is also misleading.

Almost no human being can live out the rest of their lives alone without becoming seriously dysfunctional, (and irrational). The rare human able to do this has terminal cancer or is very old and is about to pass away this very night and/or week at tops.

vilhelm_s• 11 years ago

Talking about non-human persons is standard philosophical terminology, e.g

Personhood. What is it to be a person? What is necessary, and what suffices, for something to count as a person, as opposed to a non-person? What have people got that non-people haven't got? This amounts more or less to asking for the definition of the word person. An answer would take the form “Necessarily, x is a person if and only if … x …”, with the blanks appropriately filled in. More specifically, we can ask at what point in one's development from a fertilized egg there comes to be a person, or what it would take for a chimpanzee or a Martian or an electronic computer to be a person, if they could ever be. (See e.g. Chisholm 1976: 136f., Baker 2000: ch. 3.)

(from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/)

itistoday24• 11 years ago

Under United States law companies are persons as well, so these definitions are a bit out of date.

It's perfectly reasonable to expand the term "person" to apply to non humans, companies and orcas alike.

pluma3• 11 years ago

True, but the legal definition of a person and the dictionary definition don't have to agree, so it's important which personhood we're trying to redefine.

Should orcas be legal persons? Probably not. They can't give consent and will never be able to, in principle. This is different from a mentally underdeveloped human or a human child because an orca will neither grow up to be able to give consent nor could they reach that capacity as a species (within human timeframes).

Could orcas evolve to become legal persons? Maybe, but there isn't any selection pressure guiding them in that direction.

We should however acknowledge that "personhood" is not a well-defined requirement for the rights we grant to persons. We should probably extend some of those rights to certain animals independently of whether we can consider them persons or not. They're autonomous and have some form of sentience -- it seems only fair to acknowledge that in how we treat them.

That aside, the real debate here is animal rights and what constitutes animal cruelty. Personally I think Sea World is criminally abusive because it is necessarily incapable of holding large water mammals like orcas in captivity in a way that minimizes suffering for them -- the tank size alone could not be large enough for that; the economics just wouldn't work out.

personjerry• 11 years ago

That clickbait title though. Of course an orca is not a person; an orca is not human, which is most peoples' understanding of "person".

I understand if articles might have clickbait titles, but can we give a more reasonable title on HN? Even the second part of the article title, "The more we learn about orcas, the more our assumption of innate superiority looks like a presumption" would've been more effective.

AnkhMorporkian• 11 years ago

I think a better title would be "Should we grant human rights to killer whales?" Still interesting, still thought provoking, but without the obvious absurdity.

xCathedra4• 11 years ago

The term person has established precedent, both for humans and non-humans. For humans, the legality of abortion is often thought of in terms of the humanity of the embyro. However, the actual legal issue is whether the law extends to the embyro the right of personhood.

Peter Singer has advocated both for the personhood of certain animals and the non-personhood of certain humans (including live infants below certain cognitive thresholds) for some time.

pluma3• 11 years ago

The abortion debate is largely orthogonal to the personhood of a foetus.

There is no precedent for making it illegal to refuse to risk your health, well-being and bodily integrity to sustain another person with your own body. If the risk is negligible, sure, everything else would be denial of assistance -- but pregnancy (to say nothing of birth) is extremely risky as far as biological processes go.

You could argue about a voluntary pregnancy being some kind of contract that suspends your right to bodily integrity but that still wouldn't apply to unwanted pregnancies, which represent the majority of abortions.

Arguing that a foetus' personal rights are violated by early stage termination of a pregnancy is just special pleading biased by religious ideas about the inherent sanctity of life. Most nefariously, the same people who argue for the rights of a foetus also oppose the welfare that would be necessary to address the social impacts of the unwanted birth. Or to put it more hyperbolically: "A human's life is holy, until they are born".

schoen• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personhood

yk2• 11 years ago

That is the question basically, is being human a necessary precondition to being a person? And assuming that it is, which humans are not persons ( otherwise human and person would just be synonymous).

jstanley• 11 years ago

That doesn't really follow. Just because human may not be a necessary precondition doesn't mean being human can't be a sufficient precondition.

Consider the hypothetical definition that a person is any being that is either a human or a dolphin. Now all humans are people, but not all people are humans.

PhasmaFelis• 11 years ago

Did you actually read the article? The question "Are killer whales persons" is in fact the central issue that it examines, and the use of "persons" instead of "people" ought to make it clear that they're using "person" in the legal sense.

adamnemecek4• 11 years ago

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/RNHP

sologoub• 11 years ago

They are going a bit over the top with empathy claims for orcas: "Monterey – In what is probably the first time such an event has been witnessed and recorded, humpback whales appeared to try to intervene when a pod of killer whales attacked a baby gray whale." [1]

Though different whale and dolphin species have exhibited what one could call empathy, theirs is a completely different world from ours and we shouldn't apply our values to them.

[1] http://blog.seattlepi.com/candacewhiting/2014/12/01/humpback...

itistoday24• 11 years ago

Nice exception to Betteridge's law of headlines, IMO.

xCathedra4• 11 years ago

I think the real caution behind giving the status of person to a non-human has nothing to do with animals, but with removing the status of person from certain classes of humans. The atrocities of the last century should probably suffice to establish a measure of caution when redefining personhood.

adamnemecek4• 11 years ago

can you provide an example where expanding the definition of personhood was abused as an excuse to commit atrocities?

arithma• 11 years ago

Mentally Disabled People, Hitler.

iamdave• 11 years ago

I'd consider telling an autonomous citizen what they can and cannot do with their bodies in the absence of disparate impact to the rest of the social community at large to be pretty abhorrent, and the definition of "personhood" was used to do exactly that in US abortion debates.

xCathedra4• 11 years ago

Expanding the definition to include animals necessarily involves redefining personhood, and that's the risk. Expanding personhood doesn't necessitate removing classes of people from personhood, but allowing for its redifitinion makes it possible.

kendallpark3• 11 years ago

I have wondered about this often with cetaceans. I feel like personhood is such a human concept and completely depends on who is defining it. It calls into question, "What is personhood to begin with?"

There have many documented cases of dolphins rescuing drowning human swimmers or protecting surfers from sharks. I feel like it takes a good amount of intelligence and empathy-like qualities for dolphins to be able to recognize the peril of a human creature--foreign to their natural environment--and decide to treat him as one of their own where there is no obvious benefit for the dolphin.

My opinion is that we should give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to personhood.

EDIT: This video of killer whales is also perplexing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWsN63PRCW8

A group of killer whales beach themselves to grab some sea lion pups for lunch, then proceed to toss them around and eat them. There was one seal they decided not to eat so one of the killer whales beached himself again in order to release it safely on land. It really does feel like there's complex mind behind this behavior.

pcthrowaway• 11 years ago

Is it possible the whales realized that by returning the pup to shore when they weren't hungry, they were ensuring a larger crop next year?

deanCommie• 11 years ago

Sure, but that still suggests complex reasoning

crimsonalucard2• 11 years ago

There's also documented cases of dolphins killing humans.

rwallace• 11 years ago

I'm curious; can you point to any references?

rokhayakebe• 11 years ago

Here are a few things that would help humans begin to consider animals as their equals:

Seeing animals behaving as traders as in "this is mine, this is yours, I'll trade you mine for yours."

Seeing an animal contemplate art.

Seeing animals having a conversation.

Perhaps all of these have been observed, but if so we need to be more aware of them.

Edit

One more:

Saving and passing on records of previous events

agumonkey• 11 years ago

Few things animals did that had me sitting:

# Instant group work, two monkeys having to analyse a situation to pull ropes (all rigged by researchers of course) with the right choreography to free some food. One came, saw that pulling either end alone wouldn't cut it, call his buddy, they look at each other and the rig for a second, then split each to its own end, synchronize then pull, profit. The 'no brainer' attiude killed me.

# Crows 'reverse engineering' and social hacking: https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=ted+talk+crows

# Pity bargaining, a puppy lab trying to guilt trip us into letting her go outside after being reprimanded

# An octopuss mother heating its eggs until near death, saving her last forces to swim as far away as possible so her dead body wouldn't attract predators. The sacrifice got me emotional.

# The 'lion hugging its savior' video on youtube. That lion looked overwhelmed... More human than a Disney antropomorphic lion character. Just thinking about it warms my heart.

None of this is abstract enough for us to stop thinking we're not above. I'll agree that I've never seen an animal contemplating the world the way humans do. But maybe there's no point in doing it and we're just full of ourselves :)

gnoway2• 11 years ago

I've skimmed through this a couple of times, and I think the answer is: it doesn't matter, because this article is actually about ending orca captivity by the Sea Worlds of the world. The personhood premise is just a macguffin.

gharial• 11 years ago

According to this article, there's evidence to suggest that keeping orcas in captivity is detrimental to their well being. Why does having that evidence suddenly mean having an opinion on what to do with it is off limits?

gnoway2• 11 years ago

I didn't say that. Of course it's detrimental to their well-being: Orcas are wild animals not bred for captivity. This is not new news.

rayalez• 11 years ago

It always seems weird when people are talking about whether x is a "word", and at the same time changing the definition of the "word" to mean "x".

Of course if we redefine the word "person" to mean something else, orcas can be considered "persons". We can even redefine it in such a way that a chair will be considered a "person" - but should we?

And if, as it currently stands, we have many different definitions, and are not even sure what the word means - of course we will not be sure whether orca is or is not it.

It's the same as with the debate of whether computers can be "conscious". A word is just a label, if nobody clearly understands what it means - conversation about whether or not something can be described by it is pointless.

Having said that, aside from the clickbaity title, article is pretty cool and interesting.

Edit:

Haha, I can't help but imagine that in 30 years human ethics will take another leap, orcas will be deemed sentient, and I will be denied some high status job for such an ignorant and speciest comment. And I'll have to give some apologetic speech "I deeply regret that I held such unenlightened beliefs, I profoundly apologize to the orca rights community, but I'd like to state for the record that I had a horrible day, and did not mean at all to offend the feelings of this oppressed minority by comparing them to furniture." And then the orca judge will sentence me to 10 years of eating algae of shame or something(a proper punishment as their sophisticated culture requires).

boomlinde• 11 years ago

Well, it's clear from reading the article that Lori Marino thinks that actually using the word "person" -- in acknowledging that it might not be the right word -- is secondary to granting killer whales and other animals some of the rights and privileges associated with personhood on the basis of their capacity for emotion, intelligence and empathy. In that sense, the idea isn't pointless but actually would have practical implications, as much as the abolition of slavery wasn't simply a matter of definition.

dasil003• 11 years ago

Changing the definitions of words is just part of how human language fulfills its goals of communicating any idea to anyone at any time. Think about how intractable some of these refactorings would be if you were trying to code them formally in computer programming language.

liviu-2• 11 years ago

I sometimes feel that HN tends to be a bit too strict in regards to what counts as clickbait title. The title is very much summing up the issue analysed in the article.

derefr• 11 years ago

In this case, I don't think they're arguing about whether killer whales fit into any existing definition of the word; they're asking whether we should change the definition. (Or, in two smaller steps, whether usage is shifting in such a way that a new definition is required; and whether that shift is a sensible and informed one, or one borne out of misinformation.)

toothbrush• 11 years ago

Haha, i for one welcome our orca overlords and would rather be on the right side of history! All hail orcas!

But all kidding aside, i do have appreciation for arguments against anthropocentrism, or at least suppositions of human superiority. Sure, there's a spectrum regarding to how “intelligent” (read: advanced faculties of empathy, planning, language, etc.) different species seem to be in general, but i definitely believe we as humans are very much on the bad side of the spectrum regarding how we treat non-humans. We have a long way to go yet. Locking up animals in zoos, through to slaughtering them for food after a life of misery, all don't seem to me behaviours befitting a species which calls itself empathic and intelligent. As somebody wise once said, a society should be judged on how it deals with its weakest members.

But yeah, i guess the article is preaching to the choir in my case, since i would be in favour of more protection of non-human rights, not only for orcas (presumably rather high on the intelligence scale) but also for most non-humans we use for food, medical trials, etc. Whether that means they should be granted personhood, however, seems a tricky question, which i assume is best fought out by lawyers. The thing is, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that probably entails many responsibilities and prohibitions (e.g., no killing each other) which would simply be impractical/absurd (having said that, i like the idea lower down in the thread, that inter-species violence could be considered in a similar fashion to crimes outside of a given jurisdiction). Still, if not personhood, i would at the very least be in favour of universal rights for all sentient beings (ha, i hear you now, what is the cut-off for sentience? Mice? Flies? Earthworms? Bacteria? This is a hypothetical and hand-wavy argument)—they should not be kept in zoos against their will, and (more pertinently) not be killed for our sustenance/experiments/gratification. Basically, they should not be property.

...but none of that seems to be very broadly underwritten by society at large. One can dream, i guess.

jeffdavis• 11 years ago

Does this article add anything new to the animal-sentience discussion?

qq66• 11 years ago

I don't think that capturing killer whales is a thing we should do, but I don't like this line of reasoning: "They have big brains, complex social structures, rich emotional lives -- how can we still hold them captive?"

That line of argument is based on the idea that the rights of an individual are based on the intelligence or capability of the individual. That shouldn't be the case -- if a human being has a impaired intellectual capacity, or no social relationships, that's not grounds for abridging their rights.

liviu-2• 11 years ago

That line of argument is based on the idea that the rights of an individual are based on the intelligence or capability of the individual.

I think it's based on the idea that the rights of an individual are based on the intelligence or capability of the species he's part of. Thus a single human wouldn't be singled out for lacking any of these as it's a still a human, thus treated according to human rights.

Terr_• 11 years ago

and mind-boggling sixth sense

Uhm... Usually that implies something paranormal. I assume what the author meant was sonar, which is somewhat less bogglesome.

mashedpotato• 11 years ago

Can we arrest killer whales then? Or can Orca on Orca crime be allowed?

romanlevin• 11 years ago

False equivalence. Should the police of human state A prosecute citizens of state B for something they did inside the territory of state B?

I realize that the answer is sometimes "yes", but I don't think that crimes against humanity (orca-kind?) or rendition agreements are applicable in this case.

kijin• 11 years ago

If animals are persons, and deserve some or all of the rights that humans persons enjoy, then they should also bear some or all of the responsibilities that human persons usually bear.

Oh, you just ate another sentient animal? Locked up in a zoo for the rest of your life.

So although I believe that we should treat certain animals as if they had certain rights, I don't think we should approach the topic in the same way we think of human rights. If animal have rights, they will be very different kinds of rights than what we are used to. There may also be equally large differences between different species. Orcas are just as different from dogs, if not more, as dogs are from us.

Even the right to life, possibly the most fundamental of human rights, takes on a completely different meaning when another animal claims the right to eat you. And perhaps if we think hard enough along these lines, we might also get some fresh insights about the ethics of human meat-eating.

gambiter• 11 years ago

A lot of the comments here seem to be focusing on the definition of 'person'. The fact is, 'person' has always been a species-ambiguous term. Anything that exhibits 'personality' is a person, by some definitions.

That said, I get some very strange vibes from the way this article is written, especially give the subtitle that humans may not be superior. Some choice quotes:

> Orcas, with their big brains, complex social structures, mysterious communications, and mind-boggling sixth sense, by their very existence, challenge the long-standing belief that human beings are the planet’s only intelligent occupants

"by their very existence, challenge the long-standing belief"... really? Why are any of these a true measure of intelligence?

> Social life for killer whales, as we have seen, is deeper and more omnipresent than it is for humans

This is supposition, at best.

> If orcas have established empathy as a distinctive evolutionary advantage, it might behoove a human race awash in war and psychopathy to pay attention.

Let's just ignore the way they can turn on one another and fight against other pods. Not to mention the truly brutal ways they hunt other species. So they show what we perceive as empathy. Let's apply that idea across all Orcas as if it were a rule, and then compare it to the worst humans in existence. Great.

> The ability to experience positive emotions, like love and attachment, would mean that dogs have a level of sentience comparable to that of a human child

This is used as supporting proof, but when read by itself seems more like someone pointing out the obvious flaw of anthropomorphizing the actions of animals.

> The “social cognition” that arises from this kind of richly shared experience of the world would even lead to a different sense of self than humans experience [...] The communal experience might actually change the boundaries of the self to include several individuals [...] This clearly indicates that dolphins—and particularly killer whales [...] have powerful emotional and empathic connection

So we're jumping from 'could and might' to saying the evidence 'clearly indicates' something?

I'm not trying to be overly negative, this article just strikes me as someone who is trying to twist what we know to suit their own agenda.

Are killer whales persons?

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