Animal Rights and Responsibilities

Animals in the middle ages were held accountable for their behavior when it violated human law.  Rats were charged with destroying crops, termites were convicted of property destruction, and pigs were put on trial for murder.  The animals were appointed legal defenses and actually brought to trial for their day in court. 

As preposterous as it seems today to regard animals as moral agents, capable of weighing right and wrong, and acting according to a moral compass, such views are making something a comeback.  Animals are again being brought back into court – not to punish them for their misdeeds, but to reward them with new rights and privileges – to grant them status as legal persons.  

A group called the Nonhuman Rights Project recently brought a series of legal cases arguing that chimpanzees should be granted personhood.  The basis for the case rests on the claim that chimpanzees are moral agents – goal-oriented, conscious, self-aware, autonomous beings, capable of expressing their wants, needs, and beliefs.  They deserve personhood status because they are, well, like us. 

Let me start by saying that I am sympathetic to the plight of these unfortunate animals.   The four chimpanzee defendants in these cases clearly were not living in optimal conditions, and I understand the pull to improve the quality of the lives.  But granting personhood is the wrong way to go about it.  

To begin with, the claims made on behalf of the chimpanzees are highly selective and exaggerate the similarities between chimps and humans.  To be sure, there are deep commonalities in the behavior and cognition of humans and chimpanzees, and on many different types of tasks, the performances of chimps and humans are not appreciably different.  But so, too, are there differences, and it is important to keep both in view when considering issues such as personhood.  

One important difference concerns social skills – broad-based abilities to successfully navigate a complex social world.  Chimps and humans share some social skills, which should not be at all surprising, given the common evolutionary paths chimps and humans share.  Where chimps and humans differ, however, is in a range of social skills involved in taking another’s perspective - what might be called mindreading.  Such mindreading, of course, does not literally involve getting into the head of others, but of interpreting their  behavior in context.  This is not a single ability, but a broad repertoire of skills that enable humans to, among other things, walk in the shoes of another person, and to hold others responsible for their actions. 

This ability to see things from another’s perspective has important implications for how we think about blame and personal accountability.  Only when we can, in a sense, consider things from another’s perspective do we hold that individual accountable for their actions.  Moral agency, of the sort required for consideration of animal rights, also carries with it some sense of personal responsibility.  But it is precisely this sense of responsibility – of acting according to a moral code – that is lacking in chimpanzees; and so too, is it lacking from serious discussions of nonhuman personhood. 

What do personal responsibility and moral codes even mean outside a human context?   When a male chimp kills the offspring of a competitor, should it be tried for infanticide?  When a dominant chimp demands food from a subordinate, should it be charged with extortion?  When a chimp kills an innocent mother and infant from a rival tribe, should it be tried as a war criminal?  These types of questions harken back to the animal trials of the middle ages, and seem both antiquated and naïve by present standards.  But the old views at least were more consistent with common notions of social justice (as balancing rights with responsibilities) than are the current views (that bestow rights without responsibilities). 

I suppose it might be argued that chimps be granted limited rights, say, equivalent to human children – who receive lenience from the court due to their still-developing moral compass.  From this view, chimps need our protection because they have the mental and moral capacities of young children.   Unlike children, however, the moral compass of the chimp does not develop beyond some very rudimentary level; mindreading abilities are stuck at an arrested stage of development.  Chimps are not-quite-finished humans.  

But chimps are more than simply primitive versions of humans.  They are wonderfully adaptive creatures with rich social lives.  And while their social lives differ in important ways from the social lives of humans, it is not because chimps are only approximate humans, but rather, because their social ecology does not require it.  Human social behavior and chimp social behavior have evolved in their own peculiar ways, driven by the demands of their social environments.  Thus, despite sharing some basic social skills with humans, the chimp and human social worlds split apart somewhere along the evolutionary road, with only the human branch giving rise to behavior that has any relevance whatsoever to issues of justice, responsibility, and rights. 

To apply these human-unique constructs to other animals is problematic; it is both deeply anthropomorphic – one that projects human-like intelligence onto other animals, and favors species whose behavior more resembles our own – as well as deeply paternalistic - one that places animals under dominion of humans, legally protected as morally deficient children.  Funny how an approach that purports liberation of other animals instead endorses a view of animals as perpetually subordinate and requiring our stewardship.  

I would like to suggest a more enlightened approach to understanding our relation to other animals, one that begins with the assumption that animals deserve our respect and humane care not because they see the world as we do (or as young children do), but because they see it as they do.  Comparative cognition has come to reveal a view of animal minds that is endlessly fascinating in its own right.  That such minds do not seem to include the kind of perspective taking important in human social affairs is a scientific fact, sitting alongside many other things we know about other animals.  One step toward a more enlightened ethic is to consider the full range of facts, even when the picture that emerges conflicts with our preconceived notions of what we think other animals are or should be.  Ultimately, a view informed by the science of comparative cognition – one open to both similarities and differences between species – is more empowering to other animals that one that seeks their protection as partial humans.