Published on December 17, 2011, All Dogs Go to Heaven
"I am not an animal, I am a human being," cries the character of Joseph Merrick in the movie The Elephant Man. These words encapsulate one of our most common, and most vicious, moral assumptions: that being an animal means having no inherent worth or dignity.
According to philosophers, to be a "person" is to be a member of the moral community, and thus to possess rights and deserve respectful treatment. Today all human beings are theoretically considered persons in this regard, though historically many societies have excluded and still do exclude some classes of humans (women, ethnic groups) from the category of person. Why is it so important to define personhood carefully? Because the concept has becomes a lynchpin for decision-making in a whole slew of tricky situations. Two of the classic "test cases" for personhood in bioethics are patients in a persistent vegetative state and anencephalic infants (who are born missing a large part of the brain or skull). Personhood has also gradually wormed its way into the abortion debates, as a device for focusing attention on the moral status of the fetus.
Various capacities are said to signify personhood: minimum intelligence, self-awareness, self-control, a sense of time, a sense of futurity, the capacity to relate to others, "personality" (as a collection of attributes). The problems with this kind of list-whether we require all of these capacities for personhood, or just one or another-are threefold: at least some animals fulfill all of these criteria, certain humans clearly fail in at least some categories, and traits like "ability to relate to others" or "futurity" is dangerously imprecise and open to interpretation. Nevertheless, personhood remains a potent concept in bioethics. And, the concept is routinely misused to exclude animals from the class of beings with moral worth.
We could push to have the category of "person" extended to include animals. This seems like a logical conclusion, and something some activists and some philosophers have proposed. Several legal cases have been filed to designate chimpanzees as legal "persons." A New York Times article on commercial whaling rules made the suggestion that perhaps cetaceans should be "persons" as well. The cetacean order is second only to humans in mental, social, and behavioral complexity. Whale expert Hal Whitehead says, "When you compare relative brain size, or levels of self-awareness, sociality, the importance of culture, cetaceans come out on most of these measures in the gap between chimps and humans. They fit the philosophical definition of personhood."
