GBS and Animal Rights

If a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth -- beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be to other animals -- would you concede them the rights over you that you assume over other animals?

- George Bernard Shaw

This quote from Shaw is annoying because it's prejudicial.  Suppose some kind of being from outer space considered themselves as superior to us as we (allegedly) feel ourselves to be in relation to other animals: would we concede them the rights we (allegedly) assume over other animals?  Well, if it was merely a matter of someone feeling 'superior' or claiming to be superior, absent any question of rational or scientific justification, we'd be mad to do so; but it isn't clear that conceding that in turn leaves one open to the charge of hypocrisy if one maintains that typical human adults have a status of personhood and moral agency that some other animals don't have.  The questions are, first, if there is in fact any scientifically defensible basis for the claim that humans have a moral status distinguishable from species whose common ancestry with us is measurable in geologic time, and following from that: if such a basis exists, whether it admits the possibility of intelligences that would have the moral right to deal with us as we deal with some other species.

I seem to remember a remark somewhere in Konrad Lorenz' On Aggression to the effect that, if one thinks that the same moral status extends equally to all forms of life, one should try contemplating taking a meat cleaver and chopping to bits, in succession, the following living organisms: a head of lettuce, an earthworm, a fish, a lizard, a dog, a monkey, and a human being.  While this gedankenexperiment is, in its way, every bit as intuitionistic as Shaw's, I'd respectfully urge that there is something to it.  Consider a paramecium.  It has what we may consider to be an interest.  Certain feature sets in its environment are relevant to its survival and propagation in ways that others are not; it can be characterized as implementing a certain set of rules, engaging in a sophisticated repertoire of behaviors to maintain a set of homeostatic conditions.  Because of that, it may be due a certain consideration from creatures such as us.  But its individual capacities for adaptation and learning within its environment are severely constrained, and there is no evidence from its behavior that it can reason about rule-guided behavior in other organisms, or factor the ability of other organisms to reason about rule-guided behavior into its reasoning to an arbitrary degree.  Complex as it is, it lacks - to all appearances - the complexity to support a cognitive, cultural basis for identifying sweet spots within its ecology where shared communal effort and sacrifice may accrue to the mutual benefit of all.  To identify such a thing as a person or a moral agent with rights seems like an abuse of language, comparable to labeling a fertilized zygote with a homo sapiens genome a 'person', and problematic for many of the same reasons.  In contrast, consider some of the more complex multicellular organisms with which we are familiar: I'm thinking particularly of cetaceans, the larger cephalopods, pachyderms, chimps, bonobos, pigs, and the larger corvidae.  Here we see unquestionable behavioral evidence of an awareness of self and other minds, along with at least the rudiments of language, artifacts, tradition, and culture.  Humans seem to be a particularly vigorous exfoliation of this trend, with an emphasis on tool use and environmental modification.  It is true that complex organisms, no less than single-celled ones, depend on physical processes operating in accordance with natural law, and true that there is no preferred 'direction' to evolution - but these facts do not invalidate the claim that we must invoke levels of organization and operation to account for complex organisms that are not required for simpler ones, and that this requirement reaches at least a local maximum with human civilization.  The fact that these levels of organization are deeply and evolutionarily implicated in recognizing and reasoning about the requirements of shared interest argues a gradation in moral agency with a corresponding gradation in moral culpability.  I'm not very culpable if I treat a single-celled organism instrumentalistically; only slightly more so if it is one of the (comparatively speaking) simpler multi-celled organisms.  But I'm greatly culpable if I take the same tack with an elephant, a whale, or a chimpanzee, and most culpable if I do so with a fellow homo sapiens.  With this further caveat:  numbers, and the commensurate impact on the sustaining ecology, matter.  Killing one specimen of phytoplankton is a different proposition from killing a species.

As for the matter of 'superior intelligences', it scarcely need be said that superiority of scientific knowledge is not the question - that is, it is not obvious why greater scientific knowledge alone could confer a moral right to ignore the person-hood of creatures of which it may be rationally predicated.  To the extent that a greater sophistication of intelligence reflects an enhanced ability to recognize when and where social and reflective cognition may be rationally attributed, it implies, if anything, a greater degree of moral responsibility with respect to 'less developed' organisms that may be encountered.  Albeit , to an intelligence whose information fusion and processing abilities vastly out-scoped and outstripped our own, our own processes of cognition and socialization might appear so glacially slow in comparison that its relation to us might best approximate our own relation to ecologies, or to even to geological and biological eras.  One imagines such intelligences - it is somewhat amusing to think that such AIs as we bequeath to the universe might be among them - might well exhibit a familiar skepticism about our reality as autonomous agents on the one hand, in addition to falling into religious extremism concerning us and our intentions on the other.