Personhood and animals

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 30, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 175-193

  Aaltola, Elisa ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TURKU   (Finland)

^b MANCHESTER METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ANIMALIA;

EID: 47649131521     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics20083025     Document Type: Article

References (99)

1. Colin Allen and Marc Bekoff, Species of Mind: The Philosophy and Biology of Cognitive Ethology (London: MIT Press, 1997).
2. Gary Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).
3. Nathan Nobis on David Degrazia's "On the Question of Personhood beyond Homo Sapiens," Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals, Eastern Division American Philosophical Association, 2003 at http://aphilosopher.googlepages.com/DeGrazia_comments.htm.
4. S. F. Sapontzis, Morals, Reason, and Animals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), pp. 47-70.
5. David DeGrazia, Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 265.
6. See WordNet, the Princeton on-line dictionary, at http://wordnet. princeton.edu/per1/webwn.
7. Carl Cohen, The Animal Rights Debate (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001).
8. On the history of such categorization, see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 (London: Penguin Books, 1983).
9. Paola Cavalieri, The Animal Question: Why Nonhuman Animals Deserve Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 122.
10. Michael F. Goodman, ed., What is a Person? Contemporary Issues in Biomedicine, Ethics and Society (Clifton, N.J.: Humana Press, 1988), pp. 6, 8.
11. Sapontzis, Morals, Reason, and Animals.
12. Mark Bernstein, On Moral Considerability: An Essay on Who Morally Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
13. Ibid.
14. See for instance Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);
15. Marian Stamp Dawkins, Through Our Eyes Only? The Search for Animal Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998);
16. Rosemary Rodd, Biology, Ethics, and Animals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990);
17. Lesley Rogers, Minds of Their Own: Thinking and Awareness in Animals (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997).
18. Tom Regan, The Case For Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
19. On the latter, see Gary Francione, "Personhood, Property, and Legal Competence," in Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, eds., The Great Ape Project (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1993).
20. David DeGrazia, "On the Questions of Personhood Beyond Homo Sapiens," in Peter Singer, ed., In Defense of Animals (London: Blackwell, 2004). Similar lists have been offered by, for instance, Joel Feinberg.
21. See Evelyn Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice: The Moral Significance of Human and Nonhuman Animals (London: Duke University Press 1995), p. 3. On the legal side, Steven Wise has maintained that personhood is based upon having desires, intentionality, and some degree of self-awareness.
22. Steven Wise, Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 2002).
23. David DeGrazia, "Great Apes, Dolphins, and the Concept of Personhood," Southern Journal of Philosophy 35 (1997): 301-20;
24. see also Cavalieri, The Animal Question, p. 119.
25. See also Midgley, "Is a Dolphin a Person?"
26. See John T. Noonan, "An Almost Absolute Value in History," in John T. Noonan, ed., The Morality of Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).
27. A "threshold" has been suggested, for instance by Donald VanDeVeer in "Interspecies Justice and Intrinsic Value," The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy 3 (1995) at http://ejap.louisiana. edu/EJAP/1995.spring/vandeveer.1995.spring.html;
28. for criticism, see Mark Rowlands, Animal Rights: A Philosophical Defense (London: Macmillan Press, 1998), p. 26.
29. Daniel Dennett, "Conditions of Personhood," in Amelie Rorty, ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).
30. Descartes, for one, claimed that oysters, too, would have to be included if rationality and propositional language were not heavily emphasized. The same claim has been made by Carl Cohen in The Animal Rights Debate.
31. See, for instance, Evelyn Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice: The Moral Significance of Human and Nonhuman Animals (London: Duke University Press, 1995);
32. Eileen Crist, Images of Animals: Anthropocentrism and Animal Mind (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999).
33. Paola Cavalieri, The Animal Question: Why Nonhuman Animals Deserve Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 24-25.
34. A related problem is that personhood is made indirectly - Mary is valuable because rationality is valuable.
35. See Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice.
36. A quantitative understanding of personhood has historical roots. For instance Erica Fudge points out how in the early modern England "personhood" was based upon achievement in matters such as education and language. Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (London: MacMillan, 2000), p. 10.
37. Cohen, The Animal Rights Debate, p. 35; see also Tom Beauchamp, "Opposing Views on Animal Experimentation: Do Animals Have Rights?" Ethics and Behavior, 7, no. 2 (1997): 113-21;
38. H. J. McCloskey, "Moral Rights and Animals," Inquiry 22 (1979): 25-54.
39. Cavalieri, The Animal Question, p. 28.
40. In the context of rights, Regan talks of the difference between making and having a claim. Tom Regan, The Case For Animal Rights, p. 283.
41. Although the genetic fallacy refers to equating the truth-value of a proposition with the presenter ofthat proposition, and hence claims the truth-value to be dependent on origin rather than content, it is here claimed that another variant is equating the content of x with the history of establishing x.
42. See again Regan, The Case for Animal Rights.
43. For an analysis of the "argument from marginal cases," see for instance Evelyn Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice; and Daniel Dombrowski, Babies and Beasts: The Argument from Marginal Cases (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
44. Roger Scruton, Animal Rights and Wrongs (London: Demos, 1996), p. 32.
45. R. G. Frey, "Medicine, Animal Experimentation, and the Moral Problem of Unfortunate Humans," Social Philosophy and Policy 13, no. 2 (1996): 181-211.
46. Dombrowski, Babies and Beasts.
47. Cited in Dombrowski, Babies and Beasts, p. 107. Of course, it could be claimed that both animals and marginal cases can be protected with various types of moral status - there is no need to talk of personhood. However, this approach leads to various difficulties, such as the need for justification (why would the mentally handicapped be in a different moral category?), and, in the event of a hierarchical value system, the threat of instrumental or oppressive use.
48. Midgley, "Is a Dolphin a Person?" p. 167.
49. Sapontzis, Morals, Reason, and Animals, p. 47.
50. Michael F. Goodman, ed., What is a Person? Contemporary Issues in Biomedicine, Ethics and Society (Clifton, N.J.: Humana Press, 1988), pp. 6, 8.
51. Cohen, The Animals Rights Debate, pp. 37, 53.
52. Cohen, The Animals Rights Debate, p. 37. This is a turn often taken by the contractualists.
53. See for instance Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe To Each Other (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999).
54. Also Robert Nozick emphasizes membership in the human species as a morally relevant factor. See "About Mammals and People," New York Times Book Review, 27 November 1983.
55. Scruton, Animal Rights and Wrongs.
56. Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice, p. 137.
57. See also Tom Hoffman, "Animals, Mental Defectives, and the Social Contract," Between the Species 9 (1993): 20-26.
58. Cavalieri, The Animal Question, p. 74;
59. see also James Rachels, Created From Animal: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 186-87.
60. On the question of "kinds," see also Nathan Nobis, "Carl Cohen's 'Kind' Argument for Animal Rights and against Human Rights," Journal of Applied Philosophy, 21, no. 1 (2004): 43-59.
61. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics For Our Treatment of Animals (New York: Avon Books, 1975).
62. John Dupre, Humans and Other Animals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).
63. Tony Lynch and David Wells, "Non-Anthropocentrism? A Killing Objection," Environmental Values 7, no, 1(1998): 156.
64. Ibid., p. 162.
65. Raimond Gaita, The Philosopher's Dog (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 200.
66. Ibid., p. 75.
67. Ibid., p. 76.
68. Ibid., p. 165.
69. Ibid., p. 77.
70. Cora Diamond, "Eating Meat and Eating People," in Cass Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum, eds., Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 98.
71. Ibid., p. 96.
72. Ibid., p. 98.
73. Sapontzis, Morals, Reason, and Animals; see also DeGrazia, Taking Animals Seriously.
74. Ibid.
75. Mary Midgley, "Persons and Non-Persons," in Peter Singer, ed., In Defense of Animals (Oxford: Basic Blackwell, 1985).
76. Martha Nussbaum, "Victims and Agents: What Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us about Sympathy and Responsibility," Boston Review, February-March 1998.
77. Cavalieri, The Animal Question, p. 120.
78. Ibid., p. 121.
79. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (London: Duckworth, 1999).
80. Juan Carlos Gómez, "Are Apes Persons? The Case for Primate Intersubjectivity," Etica and Animali (1998): 51-63.
81. Ibid.
82. In a similar manner, Midgley argues that personhood is based on "emotional fellowship." Midgley, "Is Dolphin a Person?" p. 169.
83. Gómez, "Are Apes Persons?"
84. Bekoff, Minding Animals.
85. The capacity to experience has been argued to be extremely old and widespread. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness (London: Heinemann, 1999).
86. Peter Wenz, Environmental Justice (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).
87. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1958), p. 178.
88. See Eileen Crist, Images of Animals: Anthropocentrism and Animal Mind (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999).
89. Jamieson, "Science, Knowledge, and Animal Minds."
90. Gaita, The Philosopher's Dog, p. 52.
91. Barbara Smuts, "Reflections," in J. M. Coetzee, Lives of Animals, p. 118.
92. Jamieson, "Science, Knowledge, and Animal Minds," p. 64.
93. Pluhar, Beyond Boundaries.
94. Sherri Irvin, "Capacities, Context and the Moral Status of Animals," Journal of Applied Philosophy 21, no. 1 (2004): 61-96.
95. This idea is close to that offered by virtue ethicists such as Martha Nussbaum, according to which we have to ensure the flourishing of beings' 'capabilities' instead of simply fulfilling their contextual preferences. Martha Nussbaum, "Beyond 'Compassion and Humanity' : Justice for Nonhuman Animals," in Cass Sustein and Martha Nussbaum, eds., Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
96. See again Bekoff's example on play in Minding Animals, chap. 6.
97. See also, for instance, Christopher Evans and Linda Evans, "Chicken Food Calls are Functionally Referential," Animal Behaviour 58 (1999): 307-19.
98. Gómez, "Are Apes Persons?"
99. Mary Midgley, "Is a Dolphin a Person?" in Susan Armstrong and Richard Botzler, eds., The Animal Ethics Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 170.