EU Court to Rule if Chimp is "Person!
Can't even take a vacation! But this is very big:
Chimp personhood is a primary goal that animal right activists seek to attain and then use as a wrecking ball to disintegrate human exceptionalism. Once a court's declares a chimpanzee to be a full person, that ruling would make chimps, in at least some regards, our legal equals, which, in turn would erect a new Noah's Ark, only this time shaped like a courtroom, with animal "guardians" soon clogging the courts with suits "by animals" demanding rights.
An early try in Austria toward this end was not successful, as I covered here at SHS. But now the EU Court decided to take that case on appeal--and that ain't good. There was no reason to take the case just to deny what does not, and has never existed. Thus I fear this means that at least some court members are considering making history (to say the least) by finding that under European law chimps are persons and fully entitled to the rights and privileges (but not the duties) thereof. From the story:
Eberhart Theuer, the animal rights group's chief legal adviser, said there is a legal precedent to appoint a guardian for an individual incapable of expressing himself. "As long as Matthew is not recognised as a person, he could be sold abroad or killed for economic reasons," Theuer said.
'His life depends on this decision. This case is about the fundamental question: Who is the bearer of human rights? Who is a person according to the European Human Rights Charter?'
A spokesman for the court in Strasbourg said: "Any application regarding this chimpanzee will be considered at a primary level by a magistrate and a lawyer before we decide whether it deserves a full-blown hearing."
The recent Swiss farce in which individual plants were accorded dignity and social animals now have constitutional rights shows the direction in which powerful elite anti-humanists and the big brained intellectuals are hell bent on taking us. And when it happens--notice I didn't say if--it will be a moral earthquake that will harm humankind profoundly, starting with the weakest among us, but eventually reaching all of us. Can you spell Pandora's box?
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 2:10 PM
12 Comments
12 Comments:
I wonder what their stance is on chimp suicide? I predict a rash of it, once they have the right.
The first article that I read on this started with the statement that the chimp himself was not capable of making this appeal. Not because this particular chimp is impaired in some extraordinary way, but because chimps CANNOT appeal for personhood. It is beyond the capacities of their animal nature. It drives me crazy when people appeal for bizarre rights for animals under the grounds that they are people too and then act as if they had some grasp of what the animal "desires."
Your collie does not want to marry you and this chimp is not worried about his status as a person. People are projecting those desires on animals. People can do that because we are different from animals and we are capable of extraordinary and sometimes incredibly misguided compassion.
This is getting fraking ridiculous..... รด.O. Wow... now im ashamed to be in the E.U.!!!
Jay Watts. You are right, sir. Ridiculous and alarming, Ricarado. From somewhere in the EU where I am sojourning.
This wouldn't bother me so much, if so many of the people pushing for this weren't also stating that human embryos AREN'T human beings...
Animals are animals and humans are humans. Animals do not have a soul. No court, no government can change that.
I hope that they rule in favour of the monkeys. That might lead to rights for creationists such as myself!
"Animals do not have a soul."
Well, we don't know that human beings have souls, either. Our arguments on ethics should be rooted in science (as WJS generally sees to it that they are), not theological concepts.
Who's going to make the first joke about making a monkey out of the court system?
It's all unbelievable.
Well, Jay, I've yet to see a comatose human appeal for their own personhood either.
I'm afraid that I would actually have to agree with the idea that some non-humans are persons and that some humans are non-persons. I don't think that personhood comes free with the taxonomic designation H. sapiens.
Joshua writes:
Well, Jay, I've yet to see a comatose human appeal for their own personhood either.
Actually, Jay countered your implied argument in the same comment when he wrote "Not because this particular chimp is impaired in some extraordinary way, but because chimps CANNOT appeal for personhood. It is beyond the capacities of their animal nature." Or as I would more sarcastically reply to you: I've yet to see a sleeping human appeal for his own personhood either!
I see.
I think it is quite simple that we cannot base our treatment of individuals on the basis of what the species as a whole is capable of. We don't give human children the right to get married, even though it is in their human nature to develop the ability fall in love and wish to commit to a relationship. We require a degree of maturity to exist before we convey them with that right. Otherwise, the right would be protecting the free use of an ability that doesn't yet exist - a right protecting something non-existent.
I do not see what is so different here with this chimp. We should convey rights to protect freedoms, and if a chimp has the ability to make choices about its own life or death, it should have a right to life. If the chimp does not have the ability to properly maintain its life, but still has this right to life, then it should have a guardian to protect it on the behalf of the chimp.
Thus, the entire argument should be resting on whether the chimp has the ability to consider its own life, and hence be considered a person. I'd argue that a sleeping human has such an ability (though they are not using it while they are asleep), and so still has this right.
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