Animal Personhood

Overthink

Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2022

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A court case over an elephant’s right to liberation from the Bronx Zoo shows that we’ve come a long way from Descartes’ concept of animal-as-machine. In episode 53, Ellie and David break down an emerging question in animal rights activism: animal personhood and moral status. What does it mean to be a person? And, what are the implications of legally recognizing animals’ right to life and bodily freedom?

Works Discussed

David Peña-Guzmán, et al., Chimpanzee Rights: The Philosophers’ Brief
Nicolas Malebranche, The Search after Truth
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On Instinct in Animals
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation
Steven Wise, Unlocking the Cage

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm David Pena Guzman.
0:08.6	And I'm Ellie Anderson.
0:10.2	Welcome to Overthink.
0:12.0	The podcast were two friends, who are also professors,
0:15.0	put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.
0:18.6	Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.
0:30.1	Ellie, I am currently involved in a lawsuit. A lawsuit about animal rights. I'm not suing anybody
0:36.4	personally in my personal life. You're not suing anybody personally in my personal life.
0:39.4	You're not suing your parents for giving birth to you the way that one guy did in the anti-natalism episode that we discussed?
0:45.6	Most definitely, not because I don't think I would get a lot of money out of my parents.
0:51.0	That's the only reason I'm not an antinatalist, legal activists. No, but I am involved in
0:56.7	this lawsuit involving animal rights that focuses on an elephant, an elephant named Happy, who is
1:03.5	currently at the Bronx Zoo, and who we are arguing, me and the other people who are involved
1:09.8	in this legal endeavor should be granted
1:13.7	freedom, should be released from the shackles of captivity. Have you met happy? I have never met
1:22.2	happy. You're just a benevolent stranger. Yeah, I'm just like a representative from a distance. I really want to
1:28.5	know why you think that Happy should get let out. But before we do that, I'm also curious, David,
1:33.7	how did you get involved in this lawsuit with this elephant that you don't even know? Yeah,
1:38.8	it's not like the most common thing for like philosophers to be involved in legal disputes.
1:43.7	But the story here, this is like the behind the scenes.
1:47.2	I attended a conference a few years ago in Atlanta, Georgia, where we went to graduate
1:53.1	school.
	...

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