Whom Would Animals Designate as “Persons”?

Abstract

Humans are animals; humans are machines. The current academic and popular dialogue on extending the personhood boundary to certain non-human animal species and at the same time to machines/robots reflects a dialectic about how “being human” is defined, about how we perceive our species and ourselves in relation to the environment. While both paths have the potential to improve lives, these improvements differ in substance and in consequence. One route has the potential to broaden the anthropocentric focus within the West and honor interdependence with life systems, while the other affords greater currency to a human-purpose-driven worldview–furthering an unchecked Anthropocene. The broadening of legal personhood rights to life systems is underway with a ruling for dolphins in India, for a river in New Zealand and with Laws of the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia. Many philosophers, ethicists, and ethologists define personhood within the confines of the dominant anthropocentric paradigm, yet alternate eco-centric paradigms offer an inclusive model that may help dismantle the artificial wall between humans and nature. In this paper, I explore these eco-centric paradigms and the implications of an associated worldview for human perceptions, self-awareness, communication, narrative, and research.

Two dialogical theorisations of children’s encounters in more-than-human worlds involving metaphor

“…This change of attitude and repositioning does not necessarily transform the nature of all others into persons (Berry, 1985: 36). Although personhood has broadened in recent ecocentric rather than anthropocentric thinking, and is long established for non-humans within non-western thought (Ingold, 2011;Malone, 2016;Oriel, 2014), personhood is not the focus here and is not required for dialogue to take place. It is not only the human that makes the dialogue.…”

Purism: Desire as the Ultimate Value, Part One An Appeal to Logical Reason

“…Hume (1740) is generally credited with the argument that the isought ‗gap' could not be bridged. However, the importance of Hume's recognition was perhaps to implicitly highlight that there is a fundamental problem with contemporary observers' generally narrow view of the purview of moralityas a state which is generally confined to conscious actions of the Anthropocene within contemporary literature (Oriel, 2014;Riddle, 2014). There is no logical basis to assume that the notion of morality should be limited to apply to the actions of humans or agents operating under specific conditions (e.g., consciousness,or the requirement to be ‗rational')as it is so often automatically and implicitly confined.…”