By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
The Institute for Emerging Ethics and Technologies (IEET) has launched a new program that has as its goal the granting of rights to “non-human persons” such as dolphins, apes and other “higher mammals” who they believe are deserving of human rights.
“Owing to advances in several fields, including the neurosciences, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the human species no longer can ignore the rights of non-human persons,” says the mission statement for the IEET’s new Rights of the Non-Human Persons program.
“A number of non-human animals, including the great apes, cetaceans (i.e. dolphins and whales), elephants, and parrots, exhibit characteristics and tendencies consistent with that of a person—traits like self-awareness, intentionality, creativity, symbolic communication, and many others. It is a moral and legal imperative that we now extend the protection of ‘human rights’ from our species to all beings with those characteristics.”
George Dvorsky, a Canadian futurist and bioethicist who serves on the IEET’s Board of Directors, will head the new program.
“It is increasingly clear that some non-human animals meet the criteria of legal personhood, and thus are deserving of specific rights and protections,” said Dvorsky. “Recent scientific research has revealed more about animal cognition and behavior than ever before, so we really have no choice but to take this prospect seriously.”
The IEET calls itself “a promoter of non-anthropocentric personhood ethics” which defends the rights of non-human persons to live free from confinement, slavery, torture, experimentation and the threat of unnatural death. It works to insure that non-human persons can live freely in their natural habitats and be given the best possible quality of life.
Lawyer and bioethics expert Wesley J. Smith says people who fight to give human rights to animals, known as transhumanists, are also known to have a deep antipathy for human exceptionalism – which is the belief that humankind enjoys a special status in nature based on their unique qualities.
“Indeed, in many ways, that loathing is the core of the movement,” Smith says on his popular blog, Second Hand Smoke.
“Human exceptionalism is the prime philosophical impediment to the acceptance of transhumanism. If, we are going to engage in Utopian manipulation and remaking of human biology and existential meaning, humans must be reduced in moral status to merely another animal in the forest. Once we morally demoted ourselves, the would-be redesigners would have a much freer hand since nothing of fundamental value would be at risk.”
Undermining human exceptionalism can be easily accomplished by employing indirect and stealth means, such as convincing society to elevate other species to the same moral status as humans, Smith writes.
“And so our old radical friends over at the Institute for Emerging Ethics and Technologies have decided to start an advocacy project intended to raise what we use to call the ‘higher mammals’ (and parrots) to legal personhood, thereby granting them rights equal to our own.”
He’s not afraid that transhumanism will actually achieve its goals, he says. “But I am concerned with the eugenics values it promotes on one hand, and the paradoxical degrading of human self worth on the other.
“Some will laugh and roll their eyes,” he adds, “but that would be a mistake.”
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