“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, December 26, 2014

Nonhuman Person

...in the shape of an Argentinian orangutan. Thanks Amanda!

"Lawyers for Argentina's Association of Professional Lawyers for Animal Rights (Afada) said Sandra was ‘a person’ in the philosophical, not biological, sense"

--correct. Nice one lawyers. Gets rid of a whole slew of unnecessary ideology. 

Science can never decide on this stuff. It only proceeds from implicit assumptions that it can't turn around and question. 

If you let science be the arbiter you are actually letting scientism be the arbiter. And since scientism tends to be default Easy Think materialism, you know what's going to happen. The orangutan has no self-concept, because you can't see it or touch it, or because no one has a self-concept at all. So “it” (definitely an it) doesn't have rights. 

Personhood just can't be found using instruments, but you can think it. 

1 comment:

amanda vox said...

I thought this was great. Points to the right side there. But the orangotan, and this means this one specific orangotan alone, still had to be ´lifted´ to the category of person to have legal standing. It is as if she were a special case, and it keeps a nonexistent difference in place.
But still, hey, well done.