Book review: Chimpanzee Rights: The Philosophers’ Brief

This is a bad book: one-sided, not honest, more akin to propaganda than philosophy... unless you're familiar with The Republic, of course. And also wrong². So this "review" is more me filling in the other side. As to why I should bother with something so bad: I blame E for owning it; and the boundaries of rights is an interesting subject.

Context: Goodreads; Wiki. As far as I can tell, their project has been a total failure. One reason for that is that law is custom; this doesn't seem to be a concept that they are familiar with, despite their reliance on the common law.

To get a few snarks out of the way: the intro tells us that the authors are "renowned philosophers" - how modest of them - who "consider" the issues. But they are lying: most of them are associate professors, a lowly form of USAnian academic life. And this is no open-minded consideration of the issue: these people have made their minds up on the pro-animal-rights side, and will not consider arguments against. They also have an irritating tendency to quote someone saying something they agree with, and then treat that as a settled point in their favour. This is also a good place to say that they made so many errors that I cannot even mention them all.

Their argument proceeds under four heads: species membership; social contract; community membership; and capacities.

Under species membership they make the apparently sensible argument that biological categories can't provide a rational basis for rights moral or legal or matters of that ilk. They don't do a good job of distinguishing morality from legality. Legally, they notice that entities can only be persons or things, and appear to dislike this; they have a third category to propose, but they don't mention it until the end of the book. They apply for habeus corpus on behalf of some chimps, which is rejected, but - in my view - vitiate their own argument by applying for HC to move them from captivity by individuals into a "sanctuary" - which is to say, captivity somewhere else (p 94 belatedly admits this; and also admits that the court noticed). This implicitly admits the obvious: chimps can't live freely as part of human society.

Why is species membership a sensible legal definition of personhood? Because it works⁴; because it is custom; and because it is an easily applied test. Our Authors do their best to obscure that last point, wurbling around about how problematic the concept of race is blah blah blah but it won't work: "is this a human?" is far too easily answered a question for their equivocation to do away with.

One day, perhaps, we will meet space aliens and have to rethink this. But the method of rethink is fairly obvious and to all appearances not needed in the near future, so we don't need to worry about it. Rather sooner, perhaps, we will meet AI and have to rethink this. But I doubt that will help the chimps.

Species membership pretty well exhausts the legal matters, but OA quotes the courts discussing reciprocity of rights and responsibilities; and so we come to social contract, which is a perfectly sensible thing to discuss in this context. OA immeadiately bring up the distinction - vital in their eyes - between persons and citizens; the latter being persons participating in the social contract. They need to do this because chimps can't - are not able to - participate, obvs; in my view this is good evidence against chimp personhood. This is the point to note that we allow personhood to humans who aren't able to participate - natural fooles; infants; the mad or demented. Partly this is due to natural sympathy; partly to avoid having to deal with the inevitable edge cases³. OA then attempt to reverse this: if you can "bear rights"¹ then you are a person, even if you cannot bear responsibilities. They then, straining mightly, use Rawls's broken "Veil of Ignorance" stuff to argue that perhaps we would agree under said VoI to extend the contract and thus rights to non-human non-rational entities. I don't think we would. But if we did consider this, unfortunately for OA, this proves too much: that argument extends the contract to stoats, weasels and ferrets, as well as OA's favourite charismatic megafauna.

Next, community membership. The idea put forward is that being a person is being a part of the community of persons (this is slightly circular, but you get their idea); in their words "We all come to be persons through embeddedness in interpersonal relationships of interdependency, meaning, and belonging". This is pretty vague. Does it help their cause? Not obviously. Their original complaint is that the chimps are being held in inhumane conditions, so they aren't part of the community. They deal with this by saying "ah, but they are capable of being part" - but is this true? I doubt putting a free chimp into a human community would end happily. Further, this would cover all house pets as well, and (due to the "are capable") clause, a great deal of other animals. Really, this attempt doesn't differ significantly from the previous.

Fourthly, we come to "capacities": things like sentience, emotion, autonomy, self-awareness, sociality. Do you need all of these, some, or shifting combinations to make you a person? In fact the list is arbitrary, and really is just a list of things that people do, retro-fitted. But never mind, because OA decide to pick "autonomy" and declare personhood based solely on autonomy (p 94). This doesn't work: autonomy is too vague, and too widely shared; indeed, on its widest fringes it is practically synonymous with life, and OA make no attempt to bound it; their efforts are all in the other direction, to stretch the category far enough to include chimps.

Under conclusions, they note that they don't have a positive account of personhood to propose. This is a fundamental problem for them, and leads them into "lawyers philosophy". "We don't know what a person is, but surely this makes you a person, and so...". As noted at the start, the law makes entities persons or things, and at last we get a thought of a third category (though they don't seem terribly enthusiastic about it and are careful not to endorse it): "sentient being". But the problem is that the simple creation of this category gives you no idea of what "rights" a member has. For example (p 105) they note a Mexican law obliging respect for the life of nonhuman animals, but as we all know that "respect" doesn't include not killing them; this is the kind of double-think you end up with when cute fluffy words run up against custom.

In my humble opinion

Enough of their wrongness. What is the right answer? The obvious answer is that personhood invloves being (capable of being) part of the social contract; and we extend that to cover natural fooles, etc., as noted earlier. What defence do chimps - or other things capable of suffering - get, from our moral or legal systems? Essentially the "repugnance" defence; see eating-a-dog bit from my review of The Righteous Mind: being cuuel damages ourselves.

Notes

1. "bear rights" is strange language; I can't tel if they really mean it, or if this is intended to be equivalent to "have rights".

2. Fundamentally, OA are nice, caring people who have allowed their compassion for chimps to override their reason.

3. On p 56 OA quote Carruthers saying exactly this. But somehow they fail to understand him; they cannot understand that there is an edge-case problem with "degree of rationality", which is a continuuos variable, but not with "degree of being human", which is binary.

4. If you object to "works" as grubby practicality that has no place in a philosophical discussion, I remind you that this is also a legal discussion; indeed primarily legal at this point.