When do we cross the line from 'animal' to 'person?'

[TaraJo]

I posted this article here a while back. Yeah, I'm kinda reposting it because I'm coming at it from a more philosophical perspective.

http://www.completegenomics.net/adventur...thal-baby/

The idea is that they're planning on creating a neanderthal baby. The question I want to ask, is this going to be a person? Surely he wouldn't have a normal life, regardless of how psychologically developed he is. The thing is, though, if it were just some ancient species of monkey, we wouldn't hesitate to put him in a cage, check his blood on a damn near daily basis, scan and test him for pretty much everything under the sun and, eventually, disect him and his brain.

But, in a very real sense, all of us are just a mutated breed of monkey. So, let's suppose we could go back and get samples from different time periods and clone babies from all along the evolutionary tree from apes to modern humans; where would we draw the line between beast and man?

[Jergus Baca]

I think to answer this question first you need to ask yourself what is truly the difference between them and us on the level of consciousness. It would not be classified as human because it is not, neither it is our predecessor it is our cousin. I think we will treat it only from the scientific frame of references because that is all it is an experiment there is a reason why they are extinct on evolutionary scale we have survived because we adopted more accurately and therefore earned our "right" to live. However to understand our origin better it is crucial that we undergo experiments like these.

---

by the word HUMAN i mean highly evolved homo grouping homo sapien sapien

[Shell B]

There is no line. Human is also beast.

[TaraJo]

There is no line. Human is also beast.

Then the question becomes 'why do we treat other animals so differently from how we treat people?'

[festive1]

Then the question becomes 'why do we treat other animals so differently from how we treat people?'

Because animals can't communicate with people. I'm sure if cows could express their feelings about how they are raised, treated, and slaughtered, people would be less apt to eat them.

[Angrboda]

I think we limit the rights and privileges we extend to animals in the same way that we arbitrate competing interests in society. To that end, we grant rights to others in society except in those cases where, a) doing so critically interferes materially with a more primary right or need of other individuals, b) is at odds with a compelling interest of society, and c) when extending that right would lead us as a society to behaving in ways which would endanger legitimate and compelling societal interests. (Empathy is an example of the latter; independent of animal rights, we don't want to encourage sadistic behavior towards animals by children, as that would lead to sadistic behavior towards humans.) I'm basically a strict speciesist and extend rights and privileges only inasmuch as it furthers our interests as a species, analogous to the situation between individuals and a society: the species is the society, and non-humans get rights only when doing so is in the interest of our species or essentially of zero cost. I reject the slippery slope, though there are obviously going to be cases where there is sufficient doubt where the gentle part of the slope extends for us to grant similar rights and privileges to an animal that in some ill-defined sense can be one of us, though they may not strictly be a part of our species.

This is a quick off the cuff reply, so I haven't considered it in any real depth, beyond my basic speciesist stance. In particular, I haven't analyzed how well it does or should describe how we deal with marginal cases (e.g. children, the mentally handicapped, people in a persistent vegetative state, coma patients), nor does it likely adequately grapple with questions of vagueness, those cases that arise because of the indistinctness of boundaries (your neanderthal hybrid), nor does it speak to other prominent hypotheticals like machine sentience. Maybe I should have had my coffee first.

[ManMachine]

Is there a line to cross?

I would argue we are still animals with a strongly species centric nature.

Regardless of how complex our domain specific and domain general strategies may be, at a base level everything we do is still driven by the same biological imperatives that drive other species. To not consider ourselves animals is just an anthropocentric delusion.

As a friend of mine once succinctly put it, all we are doing is trying to 'get away from the stink of our own shit'.


MM

[Nine]

Its going to be an interesting one. I always feel more sympathetic to more intelligent animals so it will be interesting to have a animal that is so similar to us.

[Violet]

An animal becomes a person in the same moment as it gets a personality. It doesn't stop being an animal, of course... personhood is unrelated to animalness

Then the question becomes 'why do we treat other animals so differently from how we treat people?'

Mostly, language... and we don't feel as icky for banging humans. It might even have something to do with the reproductive success of a social species being largely reliant upon that species' dominion over other species. Maybe.

[Annik]

Neanderthals looked like us, talked (although they have higher voices) like us and used stone tools. We didn't out-think them, we out-fucked them.