Nonhuman Animals as “Persons”

March 31, 2024

Nonhuman Animals as “Persons”

I was moved to write this short introduction to our topic by this article: “In Move to Protect Whales, Polynesian Indigenous Groups Give Them ‘Personhood,’” by Remy Tumin for The New York Times, March 29, 2024.

In both civil and common law legal traditions, there are now conceptions of “personhood” which are fairly elastic (and not simply metaphorical) as part of the wider philosophical and legal concepts of human “persons” or personhood.* If corporations can be conceived as “legal persons” and the fact that AI robots are now being talked about in this legal sense as well, it surely is more than plausible if not eminently reasonable that some animals (e.g., whales, dolphins, chimpanzees and bonobos, orangutans (“the name orangutan means ‘man of the forest’ in the Malay language”) and other primates, elephants, and perhaps some domesticated animals, such as dogs and non-feral cats (or even members of species that routinely interact with humans and are ubiquitous in urban environments, such as crows and ravens) receive this moral and legal recognition and status (which includes legal ‘standing’).

I won’t here go into the various arguments from philosophers and legal scholars on this score but there is a glaring issue confronting us surrounding the public rhetoric of notions of “persons” beyond that of human animals insofar as more than a few members of the general public have little if any understanding of these arguments and when they read articles such as the one here or hear sound-bite summaries of same, are likely to find both the language and the reasons proffered for “personhood” counter-intuitive; in other words, they will not be able to make sense of them. So those invoking these wider conceptions of the “person” in public fora beyond, so to speak, the standard case of human beings, have much work to do in informing and educating the public as to the merits (or lack thereof) of these legal and philosophical arguments (some of which have become entrenched in law). One way to craft the requisite arguments and “pictures” in this regard is to make it perfectly pellucid that differences and distinctions remain in this case as to what constitutes a human being or person and thus we are not effacing or ignoring or denying these differences and distinctions even when we find many instances where animals appear in many respects to be quite “like us.” In other words, human nature is not reducible to animal nature simpliciter, however much human and non-human animals are all part of the natural world’s web of life or within the jeweled-net of Indra. Rhetorically speaking, we also should not restrict ourselves to the moral and legal concept of “rights,” giving due attention, among us, to complementary corresponding notions of duty, obligation, responsibility, care, and kinship.

The handful of titles below are meant to introduce one to some of the better arguments in the literature (so it is representative of the exemplary arguments, as other equally worthy titles might have been included). I have also appended several bibliographies on the literature germane to our subject matter.

* The Wikipedia entry on Corporate personhood is a decent introduction. In the case of AI machines and robots the arguments are not, typically, made directly on behalf of conceiving these as “persons,” but the literature speaks of attributions of moral agency and responsibility, as well as minds (including human-like intelligence) to such things, thus they are seen to have some of the powers and capabilities or properties we often accord to (human) persons. For but a taste of this literature, please see: Michael Anderson and Susan Leigh Anderson, eds. Machine Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2011); Russell Blackford and Damien Broderick, eds. Intelligence Unbound: The Future of Uploaded and Machine Minds (John Wiley & Sons, 2014); Samir Chopra and Laurence F. White. A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents (University of Michigan Press, 2011); Mark Coecklbergh. AI Ethics (MIT Press, 2020); Mark Coecklbergh. Robot Ethics (MIT Press, 2022); Markus D. Dubber, Frank Pasquale, and Sunit Das, eds. The Oxford Handbook of AI (Oxford University Press, 2020); Katherine B. Forrest. When Machines Can Be Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Justice in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (World Scientific Publishing Co., 2021); David J. Gunkel. The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots, and Ethics (MIT Press, 2012); Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen. Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong (Oxford University Press, 2009). Finally, for a wide-ranging and characteristically incisive treatment of the concept of a person and closely related concepts and conceptions within the ambit of the history of philosophy of mind, please see the section on “Persons and Personae,” in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (Beacon Press, 1988): 25-98.

Boyd, David R. The Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution that Could Save the World. Toronto: ECW Press, 2018.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022.
Rowlands, Mark. Can Animals Be Persons? New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Steiner, Gary. Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Wise, Steven M. Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals. Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2001.
White, Thomas I. In Defense of Dolphins: The New Moral Frontier. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.