Are killer whales persons?
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Are killer whales persons?
1–10 of 65 posts
Re: Are killer whales persons?
#2If they are, I demand my own tank and as much fish as I can eat.
Re: Are killer whales persons?
#3The advertising on this was so obnoxious (a 5 second video popup that I couldn't dismiss) that I was just left with Betteridge's law of headlines here.
Re: Are killer whales persons?
#4> Intercepted echolocation data could generate objects that are experienced in more nearly the same way by different individuals than ever occurs in communal human experiences when we are passive observers of the same external environment. Since the data are in the auditory domain, the “objects” they generate would be as real as human seen-objects than heard “objects,” that are so difficult for us to imagine. They could be vivid natural objects in a dolphin’s world.
Not directly related to the personhood question, but for me it was the highlight.
Re: Are killer whales persons?
#5"Can an animal be a person?"
According to the definition, a "person" refers to a human [0][1]. Perhaps the better question is should we treat the whales better or differently based on what we learned rather than shoe-horn them into a word that literally means human.
[0] Oxford English: "A human being regarded as an individual" [1] Merriam-Webster: "a human being"
Re: Are killer whales persons?
#6"Can an animal be a person?" According to the definition, a "person" refers to a human [0][1]. Perhaps the better question is should we treat the whales better or differently based on what we learned rather than shoe-horn them into a word that literally means human. [0] Oxford English: "A human being regarded as an individual" [1] Merriam-Webster: "a human being"
I think saying a human being can be called a "person" - meaning rational agent, is also misleading.
Almost no human being can live out the rest of their lives alone without becoming seriously dysfunctional, (and irrational). The rare human able to do this has terminal cancer or is very old and is about to pass away this very night and/or week at tops.
Re: Are killer whales persons?
#7That clickbait title though. Of course an orca is not a person; an orca is not human, which is most peoples' understanding of "person".
I understand if articles might have clickbait titles, but can we give a more reasonable title on HN? Even the second part of the article title, "The more we learn about orcas, the more our assumption of innate superiority looks like a presumption" would've been more effective.
Re: Are killer whales persons?
#8That clickbait title though. Of course an orca is not a person; an orca is not human, which is most peoples' understanding of "person". I understand if articles might have clickbait titles, but can we give a more reasonable title on HN? Even the second part of the article title, "The more we learn about orcas, the more our assumption of innate superiority looks like a presumption" would've been more effective.
I think a better title would be "Should we grant human rights to killer whales?" Still interesting, still thought provoking, but without the obvious absurdity.
Re: Are killer whales persons?
#9"Can an animal be a person?" According to the definition, a "person" refers to a human [0][1]. Perhaps the better question is should we treat the whales better or differently based on what we learned rather than shoe-horn them into a word that literally means human. [0] Oxford English: "A human being regarded as an individual" [1] Merriam-Webster: "a human being"
Talking about non-human persons is standard philosophical terminology, e.g
Personhood. What is it to be a person? What is necessary, and what suffices, for something to count as a person, as opposed to a non-person? What have people got that non-people haven't got? This amounts more or less to asking for the definition of the word person. An answer would take the form “Necessarily, x is a person if and only if … x …”, with the blanks appropriately filled in. More specifically, we can ask at what point in one's development from a fertilized egg there comes to be a person, or what it would take for a chimpanzee or a Martian or an electronic computer to be a person, if they could ever be. (See e.g. Chisholm 1976: 136f., Baker 2000: ch. 3.)
Re: Are killer whales persons?
#10They are going a bit over the top with empathy claims for orcas:
"Monterey – In what is probably the first time such an event has been witnessed and recorded, humpback whales appeared to try to intervene when a pod of killer whales attacked a baby gray whale." [1]
Though different whale and dolphin species have exhibited what one could call empathy, theirs is a completely different world from ours and we shouldn't apply our values to them.
[1] http://blog.seattlepi.com/candacewhiting/2014/12/01/humpback...