A headline in the Times of London today caught my eye, at least partly because, as we approach the Singularity, we’re running out of time to seriously consider nonhuman intelligences and their place in our world. That headline:
Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'.
I’m already a signatory to the Great Ape Project and its three basic protections for all great apes, rather than just for us. Those three protections:
• the right to life
• the protection of individual liberty
• the prohibition of torture
Simply put, this means that we cannot torture, imprison, or kill other great apes. To me, these guidelines for treatment of our closest taxonomic relatives seem eminently reasonable. I know that won’t be the case for plenty of people (there’s that word again).
Spain has embraced the GAP’s three protections for the other great apes, and New Zealand has, as well, declaring them “non-human persons.” (Though for the record, some genetic analysis suggests that chimpanzees are, in fact, human.
Today’s Times article marks the first time I’ve heard mention of personhood for non-primate species. And I embrace it. The main problem I have with society’s current, simplistic approach to this is that it places all beings in one of two groups: Persons or property.
Property can be damaged or destroyed but, legally speaking,it has no interests deserving of protection. Declaring other species of demonstrable intelligence, species such as the other great apes and the dolphins, property gives them the legal standing of, say, a shoe.
That is simply too clumsy, too hamfisted a way to describe us and other forms of intelligence.
I adapted Orson Scott Card’s degrees of alienness from his novel Speaker for the Dead. Before proceeding here, I want to make clear that I do not embrace Card’s politics; I merely find what he was doing here to be a good step toward a useful way of thinking about nonhuman intelligences:
• Utlänning, or outlander: the stranger that we recognize as being a person of our world, but of another city or country.
• Främling. The stranger that we recognize as person, but of another world.
• Raman, the stranger that we recognize as person, but of another species.
• Varelse, the true alien, with whom no conversation is possible. They live, but we cannot guess what purposes or causes make them act. They might be intelligent, they might be self-aware, but we cannot know it.
• Djur, the dire beast, a marauding, unreasoning threat, a monstrous, fearsome murderer.
Note that here "person" really means "comprehensibly sentient."
The difference between ramen and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity.
It means that we have.
Why is this useful? Specifically because it places the responsibility of deciding who to declare a person upon us — and because our ruling on the matter says more about us, as the decision makers, than it does of the species being considered.
Widening the circle of personhood is what this is all about, to me. Here in the U.S., we’ve done this before, when we blotted out the preposterous assertion that black people were three-fifths human. One day, legally speaking, they were not people, the next, they were. The same thing happens if a bonobo chimpanzee is transported into Spain: Before the bonobo crosses into Spain, “it” is a “thing,” having no rights or interest deserving of protection, but once the bonobo enters Spain, legally, he is a person.
It is important to be thinking about this issue, too, as it regards artificial intelligence. A sufficiently advanced AI, one that is, as described above, "comprehensibly sentient,” would deserve personhood, in my opinion; otherwise, you have a comprehensibly sentient being who is property. And that’s slavery.
Please, no flames, and please don’t try to make this about the very separate issues of veganism/vegetarianism. And thanks for reading and considering this subject. These are my opinions and reflections, and are in no way intended to insult or offend anyone reading this.
On the issue of personhood, we either mature out perspectives, and fast, or get run over when the consequences catch up and overtake us.