Culture & Ethics
Habeas Chimpus: A Report from Stony Brook University
Our colleague Wesley Smith comments on the recent court decision regarding the granting of personhood to two chimpanzees here at Stony Brook University. The judge has subsequently revoked the habeas corpus ruling, although the dangerous notion of personhood for non-human animals remains a core assertion by the Nonhuman Rights Project.
I strongly oppose the granting of personhood status to non-human animals. Non-human animals are worthy of protection in accordance with their sentience and capacity for suffering, but they are not persons. The legal status of personhood properly belongs only to human beings acting alone or acting in aggregate (e.g. corporations).
We certainly have a responsibility to treat animals humanely. I have no exceptional personal or professional insight into the circumstances here at my university involving these chimps, but generally speaking I believe that animals who clearly have a substantial capacity for suffering (such as primates) should be treated with meticulous care for their physical and emotional well-being. I have done animal research myself (not on primates), and I emphatically believe that we have a responsibility to care for these animals and only to cause harm to them when the benefit to humans substantially outweighs the harm done to the animal, and the harm is minimized to the greatest extent possible consistent with scientific needs. Scientists can lose sight of their fundamental responsibility to care for their research animals, and vigilance is appropriate.
That said, the animal rights movement often is excessive and can be a particularly malignant and even violent influence. The attribution of personhood to animals has the ineluctable tendency to denigrate human rights, and to introduce into the legal and philosophical concept of personhood the coercive notion that the rights of humans are negotiable, inasmuch as they can be applied to animals as well.
The worst atrocities of modern times have been the result of the denial of human exceptionalism and the equation of human beings with animals to be bred and culled. Eugenic atrocities and the Holocaust stand as dreadful reminders of the importance of respect for human exceptionalism in our legal and social affairs.
The granting of personhood to animals will lower the status of persons more than it will raise the status of animals. It is a very dangerous precedent.
Image by frank wouters (originally posted to Flickr as in de hangmat) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.