Bonus: Are animals... people?
Species
Macken Murphy
4.8 • 606 Ratings
🗓️ 25 January 2019
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
While it may seem weird to call a nonhuman animal a "person," Argentina has done just that - in their country, chimpanzees and orangutans enjoy the benefits of legal personhood.
In America we like to think of "human" and "person" as equivalent terms, but that is demonstrably not the case; at least not legally.
So... Should other animals be considered people?
Vote: https://twitter.com/SpeciesPodcast/status/1088911107224416257
Bibliography: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PtGd9rO9G943JDw2e01PlEHlLek0fj6JakkTuYwo9Ao/edit?usp=sharing
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, I'm Mackin. This is Species, and today we are going to talk about why human and person are not necessarily synonyms. |
| 0:11.5 | Bear with me, I know it sounds a little crazy. Personhood is a moral and legal concept that's pretty ill-defined and extremely complicated. |
| 0:19.7 | Today we're going to get into the weeds of a |
| 0:21.3 | surprisingly challenging debate. What makes a person and are animals people? Quick warning, |
| 0:27.6 | this episode will be mentioning some controversial topics, so if you aren't interested in philosophy |
| 0:32.5 | or if political topics upset, you just skip this one. For everyone else, I promise I'm going to stick to the facts, |
| 0:38.9 | I'm going to keep my own opinions out of it, and I'm going to follow a few different lines of logic, |
| 0:42.5 | because I think this is a topic reasonable people can reasonably disagree on. I hope you enjoy. |
| 1:01.0 | If you saw a guy on the street waving around a sign that said, |
| 1:05.3 | Animals are people too, you would probably dismiss them as crazy. |
| 1:07.2 | A few years ago, I certainly would have. |
| 1:10.9 | I would probably even cross the street to avoid interacting with him in cases insanity was contagious. But since then, I've explored the legal philosophy of personhood a bit, |
| 1:16.8 | and I've found that there is way more to this argument than meets the eye. Just recently, |
| 1:21.5 | courts in Argentina have granted legal personhood to orangutons and chimpanzees. I've got a few listeners in Argentina, |
| 1:28.8 | and let me assure them now that I am not stupid enough to dismiss their legal system as crazy |
| 1:34.2 | because of my own biases. So today, I'm going to talk about the history of personhood in America, |
| 1:38.8 | the current state of legal personhood, and the logical avenues we can go down to try and get at the essence of what |
| 1:46.7 | it means to be a person. So how can the Argentinians give personhood to a non-human animal? Isn't it |
| 1:54.4 | totally contrary to the word person to classify a non-human as one? Americans, by and large, |
| 2:00.7 | seem to have a pretty strong belief in legal personhood, |
| 2:03.8 | but a pretty weak grasp of what it is. |
| 2:07.2 | If we are to define a person, let's say, as a legal entity deserving basic natural rights, |
... |
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