Andrew Revkin: Can Animals Be People?

Can animals be people? Andrew Revkin addresses this question and the ethical issues it raises in his article for the New York Times entitled “When is a Person Not a Human? When it’s a Dolphin, or Chimp, or…” Specifically, he focuses on the recent push to have dolphins recognized as persons due to their complex mental faculties and the ethical arguments which proponents of this view use to claim moral rights for dolphins and other animals capable of “higher” forms of mental activity and social interaction. The ideas presented in his article are fundamentally related to the basic theories of morality and the basic conceptions of the nature of right and wrong that they represent. Revkin begins his article by referencing Professor Thomas I. White’s …show more content…
Of course, both of these arguments seem to have their roots in Kantian ethics, which stresses the dignity of autonomous actors as the basis of morality; however, both seem to have much broadened the concept of dignity so as to include other animals. The argument from personhood though is considerably narrower in scope than Regan’s, which confers inherent value upon any sentient mammal. The major stumbling block for the argument from personhood as I see it is where the line is drawn. At what point are a creature’s intellectual capacities or social behaviors sophisticated enough to warrant the label of personhood? Certainly, not even the proponents of the theory would argue that a dolphin can be held morally responsible for its actions. Moreover there is the fundamental question of why personhood is morally relevant in the first place, as this definition would seem to forego the Kantian argument that dignity is derived from autonomy (and thence the ability to live according to reason), as it would be quite a stretch to suggest that dolphins are capable of living according to the dictates of …show more content…
Even though most or all the criteria of what we consider personhood may be possessed by dolphins and chimpanzees, the ethical implications are likely to remain uncertain. Even though one could make a sound argument for the rights of dolphins based on their personhood in Kantian terms, one who sees morality from a virtue perspective for example might still consider it completely consistent for humans as rational and social creatures to “capture, enslave, and slaughter” non-human creatures, regardless of their intellectual capacities. Likewise, one might from a natural law perspective contend that it is entirely consistent with nature for humans to kill or otherwise harm other animals (as many other animals in fact do). In other words, I believe that even if the personhood of dolphins is definitively established as the article argues, the moral questions surrounding that reality will likely remain unresolved for the foreseeable