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Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'

timesonline.co.uk

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Re: Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'

#61

Post by miles »

grellas wrote: post #2

Marino and Reiss will present their findings at a conference in San Diego, California, next month, concluding that the new evidence about dolphin intelligence makes it morally repugnant to mistreat them. It is morally repugnant to mistreat animals regardless of the intelligence of the animal and being a scientist has nothing to do with making such a judgment, since it is not a scientific judgment but an ethical one.…

"What is it that should trace the insuperable line? ...The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" -- Jeremy Bentham

Re: Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'

#62

Post by JulianMorrison »

jacquesm wrote: post #29
JulianMorrison wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely the opposite - disabled people are a perfect illustration of why humans are definitely "people". We work around our difficulties. Can't hear? Use sign language. Can't speak? Write it down. Human minds in dolphin bodies would quickly work out similar hacks. The fact that dolphins don't is what makes it hard to qualify them as people.

> I would want evidence of bidirectional conversation before calling them "people". There are plenty of people that are not capable of that in any way that most people would recognize. The dog analogy comes to mind: Dogs are smarter than people because they understand us but we do not understand them. edit: We seem to place the onus of proving your intelligence and your ability to communicate on others before giving…

I think it's a reasonable barrier. Ant nests are fairly capable as reactive systems but limited by the inflexibility of the stigmergic control systems they're running on. I doubt such a substrate could implement true intelligence.

As for humans - "locked in" people are a special case, their outputs have been entirely disconnected (unlike dolphins). But we are pretty close to having the tech to reconnect them. Again, humans find a way around it.

Exception: there are humans who IMO do not qualify as people. That is, no measurement even with a mind-reading machine would call them sapient - they get grandfathered in because they share a species with us

Re: Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'

#63

Post by brl »

anigbrowl wrote: post #53
hyperbovine wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plants and animals are made of essentially the same thing? Plants have no nervous system and absolutely no capacity for suffering. It is impossible to inflict pain on a plant. By contrast, most animals are capable of experiencing physical and even mental anguish. Once you admit this, good luck trying to build a coherent moral argument for why human suffering should be abhorrent while all other forms of animal sufferi…

I'll cheerfully refute it: lower animals do have the capacity to feel pain (so we shouldn't be cruel) but not, it appears, the capacity to hypothesize about the future - that is, pigs don't suffer anxiety over the probability of ending up getting slaughtered for bacon when they're sufficiently bulky. this is a major qualitative difference between us and other animals (that we know about).

Since we really have no way to know for sure how much thinking about the future a pig does while confined on a grim industrial farm or exactly how much anxiety that pig experiences nervously worrying about the future, maybe we could give them the benefit of the doubt?

Re: Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'

#64

Post by brl »

jacquesm wrote: post #21

Personally I think it would be great if humans started treating other humans categorically in an ethical way. That's a ways off I'm afraid though. It's important to see that these are obviously non-related issues but I don't have much hopes for our stance towards Dolphins as long as we haven't learned to do this with each other.

To me this is quite obviously a very related issue.

As long as people refuse to recognize the moral interests of animals, it is not logically consistent for them to respect moral obligations to other humans. The moral distinction between animals and humans is a completely arbitrary prejudice and should be immediately identified as such by anybody with even a basic understanding of evolutionary biology.

Humans are animals.

Re: Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'

#65

Post by philk »

jacquesm wrote: post #50
randallsquared wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

David Brin starts off one of his articles talking about this: http://www.crackaddict.com/~nalgas/David_Brin-Dogma_of_Other...

That's a really good read. It's interesting how in his interaction with his audience people have an enormous problem letting go of their usual frame of reference. The Dolphin example is a great one because just like with chimps (or pigs!) there is obviously some modicum of intelligence there, it's an alien one because of the lack of shared references but it comes with all the ethical issues that the discovery of an e…

I'm not sure you can beat up on humans alone for exterminating species, after all, species have gone extinct before humanity.

We are substantially better at wiping out other species but that's more due to our technological advancement than any extra maliciousness on our part.

Re: Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'

#66

Post by rms »

jacquesm wrote: post #50
randallsquared wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

David Brin starts off one of his articles talking about this: http://www.crackaddict.com/~nalgas/David_Brin-Dogma_of_Other...

That's a really good read. It's interesting how in his interaction with his audience people have an enormous problem letting go of their usual frame of reference. The Dolphin example is a great one because just like with chimps (or pigs!) there is obviously some modicum of intelligence there, it's an alien one because of the lack of shared references but it comes with all the ethical issues that the discovery of an e…

It would be dolphin steak mislabeled as some other kind of meat... because of their place at the top of the food chain, dolphin meat is dangerously high in mercury.

Re: Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'

#67

Post by SapphireSun »

jimbokun wrote: post #49
davepeck wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I define my heirarchy by the ability of the species to comprehend the universe and its disruptiveness to other species. This is probably equally arbitrary, but it has at least some logic behind it. I have a very similar view of the world, and when a friend tried to get me (last night!) to put it on firm logical footing, I was unable to. Why should our ability to comprehend the universe be the yardstick by which we…

"Why should our ability to comprehend the universe be the yardstick by which we measure ourselves?" The movie Avatar (obviously on my mind because I recently saw it) tries to bring the audience around to the opposite conclusion. The movie makes clear that the humans better comprehend the universe (star ships, ability to create bodies to control remotely, etc.) but then unequivocally roots for the aliens who demonstra…

If you want to go back to Kant (my grasp is a bit shaky but it will do), the reason we care about conscious beings over non-conscious beings/things is because they are the source of the "good will" and produce value in the world. The world is dark and valueless without thinking being to grant value to the valueless. If dolphins are conscious, then they too are sources of the "good will" and are deserving of treatment befitting of it.

However, Kant's philosophy leads to some strange places if you push it too far (like all philosophies). I think humans innately combine a mix of Utilitarianism with Kantianism to come up with intuitive judgements - which is a pretty obvious and useless statement, but if we take it at face value it means that when we are confronted with extrema, we would do well to consider both sides of the coin.

Re: Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'

#68

Post by kaitnieks »

We certainly don't need to fear that dolphins could try to dominate or exterminate us. So why bother treating them in any special way? The reason for morale and ethics is to maintain society and minimize risk of revenge. In case of dolphins there's hardly a society, the risk of revenge is none. To keep natural balance we should restrain ourselves from killing them all off or domesticating all of them and that's it.

Maybe this is too brutal opinion for modern times but I think people have gone too far in their foolishness. We should remember our real place and our real power, so that we can learn to use it more responsibly, instead of playing silly Ramen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concepts_in_the_Ender%27s_Game_...) games out of the boredom.

Re: Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'

#69

Post by rms »

kaitnieks wrote: post #68

We certainly don't need to fear that dolphins could try to dominate or exterminate us. So why bother treating them in any special way? The reason for morale and ethics is to maintain society and minimize risk of revenge. In case of dolphins there's hardly a society, the risk of revenge is none. To keep natural balance we should restrain ourselves from killing them all off or domesticating all of them and that's it. M…

It's an emotional argument, not a logical argument.

Re: Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'

#70

Post by elblanco »

nitrogen wrote: post #59
nradov wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Domesticated dogs appear to have "empathy" with humans because over thousands of generations, the ones who acted that way got fed and bred more.

Selective pressures on early humans "caused" them to behave as though they were experiencing emotion and demonstrating a sense of self, because those were the ones that got more food and produced more offspring. If dogs have evolved to demonstrate some of the behaviors humans do, how can anyone prove that they are simply mimicking those behaviors instead of actually experiencing the same neurochemical reaction we do?…

> how can anyone prove that they are simply mimicking those behaviors instead of actually experiencing the same neurochemical reaction we do?

Tests like the Turing test see that as irrelevant. Basically if an animal behaves like it feels emotions, it does feel emotions.

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