Dolphin personhood

Rottweiler

Some think dolphins merit the rights of persons because of their intelligence.

But the most basic premise of human rights is that a person, simply by being a person, has inherent rights to never be killed, raped, or experience sundry other abuses by another person. But raping and killing are normal parts of dolphin behavior. To enforce their rights, you'd need scuba-diving police who can keep up with dolphin pods and prevent them from assaulting each other,

Forzare

Clearly, the answer is to gather up all of the dolphins that we can and rape them to show them that they have no rights.

Nyarly

...the fuck?

Komodin

^ What he said.

GLORIOUSLeader

OP: Exactly. It's not a good thing to enforce the treatment of dolphins as persons when they not only also maim, kill, and rape, but do it out of instinct and can't be trained not to (save for raising them in captivity, which is impossible for all the world's dolphins).

Nyarly

Just because humans are animals, not every animal can be a person. And as intelligent as dolphins may be, I don't trust them to be intelligent enough to refrain from killing and raping.

TheConductor

We could KILL all the worlds dolphins bar the pregnant females (I actually have no clue how Dolphin babies come to term) and raise their children in captivity.

Gelzo

Isn't raping and killing a normal part of human behavior? Granted it isn't as common for individuals who have a stable environment and psychology, but it's a part of daily life for some people.

snowbull

Yeah, but actively policing humans isn't as hard.

Katrika

Raping and murdering isn't the NORM for humans, and like you said, usually we can be raised to avoid it. Dolphins, not so much. Then again, male mallard ducks form rape-squads during the mating season, so...

Gelzo

I think you'd have to give me a definition for what is the norm for humans. It's not hard to imagine a human culture where experiencing rape is mandatory for all members.

I don't know much about how arranged marriages work, but...

Khwarizmi

I think for this to be anything other than ridiculous we'd either need some way to communicate properly with dolphins or else the dolphins would have to come up with "dolphin rights" themselves and change their behaviour accordingly first.

AFAIK we have no reason to believe either of these things are possible, so this is silly.

Katrika

Right, but there's a difference between culture and instinct. Humans don't actually have much true 'instinct' left, so while I suppose in a world without consequences there'd probably be a lot of rape and murder too, it's debatable how much that's a result of instinct.

snowbull

^^^^It is in South Africa.

LouieW

Rottweiler,
I apologize if this is a bit off-topic, but this kind of reminds me of the idea of speciesism.  I think the biggest issue with saying that certain beings, whether human or non-human, deserve rights because of intelligence is that one could potentially exclude human beings who are born with severe mental disabilities. In fact, I remember hearing an argument based on the idea of speciesism that if people treat animals as inferior to humans they should do the same to mentally disabled infants since the two groups supposedly have equal intellectual capacity.

Personally, I think that even such infants deserve to be treated with respect (as should all people) so I do not believe that intellect should be the main factor in determining whether or not someone should have basic rights.

That being said, I think that abusing animals is really awful. Even if they may not have individual rights under the Constitution per se, I believe that people should treat animals well out of a duty to be kind and gentle to all.

Gelzo

"Humans don't actually have much true 'instinct' left"

What the fuuuuuuuck

I'm kind of hoping you don't know what you said.

Khwarizmi

Well, we are sufficiently intelligent to reason, rather than just following base instincts, and we have society and values and ideals and so on.  So I think it would certainly be accurate to say that we don't act according to pure instinct.

snowbull

Neither do animals. They examine things, think and make choices.

Khwarizmi

Not all animals.  And they don't have more complex ideas like morality to influence their behaviour, AFAIK.

Gelzo

Of course, much of what you're doing at a given moment isn't really something you've reasoned out as something you should do, and much of culture is similarly something that probably originated from what you could call instinct.

Anyway, the reproductive patterns of humans should be sufficient evidence that instinct for us exists.

^IIRC that's sort of inconclusive. I can't cite any experiments that would be relevant, but I'm not going to claim that humans are the only creatures with any concept of morality at all.

Katrika

Hmmmmm...I guess I was wrong.

Although, snowbull, I'm not sure if I could imagine a jellyfish with much reasoning power. =P

Vorpy

male mallard ducks form rape-squads during the mating season

Funniest thing I read all day.

IanExMachina

Live in a town near a river, watch as couples go awwh at the ducks in spring as they walk in in a pair. 

Watch as more mallards turn up and the couple see duck gang rape, feel smug because you knew more zoologically and that the couple had a touching moment ruined.

Also:

There is a paper out that that discussing mallards fucking other dead mallards.

Gelzo

God, that's like a scene from a Far Side comic Gary Larson kept to himself. A couple watching a couple of ducks, becoming shocked when they see them get raped; a stranger walks by with a grin on his face, implying he intentions to rape them.