Posted on 04/27/2014 4:13:57 PM PDT by don-o
How does a thing become a person? In December 2013, the lawyer Steven Wise showed the world how, with a little legal jujitsu, an animal can transition from a thing without rights to a person with legal protections. This Op-Doc video follows Mr. Wise on his path to filing the first-ever lawsuits in the United States demanding limited personhood rights for certain animals, on behalf of four captive chimpanzees in New York State. Continue reading the main story Related in Opinion
Dot Earth Blog: A Closer Look at Nonhuman Personhood and Animal WelfareJULY 28, 2013
Mr. Wise (who is also the subject of The New York Times Magazines cover story this Sunday) has spent more than 30 years developing his strategy for attaining animal personhood rights. After he started his career as a criminal defense lawyer, he was inspired by Peter Singers book Animal Liberation to dedicate himself to justice for animals. He helped pioneer the study of animal rights law in the 1980s. In 2000, he became the first person to teach the subject at Harvard Law School, as a visiting lecturer. Mr. Wise began developing his animal personhood strategy after struggling with ineffective welfare laws and regulations that fail to keep animals out of abusive environments. Unlike welfare statutes, legal personhood would give some animals irrevocable protections that recognize their critical needs to live in the wild and to not be owned or abused. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage
Should a Chimp Be Able to Sue Its Owner?APRIL 23, 2014
The current focus of Mr. Wises legal campaign includes chimpanzees, elephants, whales and dolphins animals whose unusually high level of intelligence has been recognized by scientific research.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
WE ?
My chimp dislikes shyster lawyers, and would probably try to bite one who suggested he should sue.
Animals are logical, smart, can be “guilted”, etc. I think what they lack is introspection.
Other Worlds of Isaac Asimov - It’s kindle time...
http://www.asimovreviews.net/Stories/Story135.html
Thanks for the link Civ
Animal liberationists are not unlike the Nazis. Any movement that sets out to treat animals as humans will inevitably result in humans being treated like animals. Hence Nazis could feel good about outlawing the docking of sheeps tails and yet brand humans, ship them around in cattle cars and kill them with less thought for their suffering than they would for a cow killed for meat. It’s ironic that Jews are very prominent in A.L movement.
I see no evidence that animals use the laws of logic.
Fine by me. I was just trying to be helpful.
I try not to read too much into it. If old Adolf got one right, then what the hey.
But rats won’t come up with differential calculus anytime soon, lovable as they are.
Perhaps, but let’s look at the bigger picture. ALL living things have some aspect of consciousness. The greater complexity we humans exhibit is due to our intricate brain making possible the fabrication of holographic meaning to the data we receive from events that have already happened. There is a gorilla who uses sign language on a primitive level, but she knows she is communicating so the use of language indicates use of syntax ... a form of logic.
Modern science has never clearly defined the life force.
Person... something that can be sued for damages.
In my big ToE (Theory of Everything) there is a dimension as real as dimension space or dimension time from which life force/consciousness is sourced. There is also a dimension of spirit. Consciousness inveigles space and time to exhibit living beings/things. Without time events do not occur and without space things do not exist, in the terms of how we define reality. There are at least three variable expressions of each dimension, and maybe more.
I believe the quantum mechanical electrical properties existing within proteins and lipid layers enable hyper light communication within living systems. The ability to “anticipate” thermodynamics through hyperlighspeed micro communication within molecular systems is what we call life.
You would enjoy a paper by Bernard Haisch, et al, published in Physics in 2005. He and a guy named Rueda, along with some input from Hal Puthoff have derived F = ma showing that wave function of the quantum vacuum, the zero point field, is the source of inertia and gravity. I don’t have the addy at my finger tips but it is googleable using Haisch Zero Point Field. You’ll want to read the 2005 paper for it’s more simple mathematical tightness. I want to get them to go one step further, to look at the zero point field as causing inertia because of pointing vector of time in every ‘parton’. I’m convinced that dimension Time is not what we have been thinking it is, as some background state. It has variable expressions, such as linear, planar, and volumetric.
The foundational principles behind this, is that we make up moral principles. They are not laws like mathematics, but a derivative of of culture, sort of like the current style of architecture. Without the common moral ground applicable to all persons we are left to the vasile thoughts of men. Disbelief in common moral ground is rapidly becoming a pillar of middle-class prejudice. How often have we heard 'I will not allow you to impose your morality on anyone else'. We see it every day with law suits by atheists to disallow Christians in the military from having access to a Bible.
I think we are not so far apart in the question before us. My problem is that due process, today, seems to be arbitrarily applied.
To quote Forrest Gump, "I'm kinda tired now, I think I'll go home."
My dog is offended to be considered beneath subhuman scum that are progressives. Hevk, he thinks he’s more people than people.
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