are whales, dolphins, porpoises, elephants people?

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Are the above mentioned animals intelligent enough to be considered people?

ruveyn

Dolphin males rape each other and other species like humans, gang bang the females, kill members of other related species like porpoises for sport, and can cooperate to create a new synchronized behavior in captivity. Whales sing love songs to each other over vast distances, and also sing to keep a record of time. Unfortunately this communication is obstructed by noise pollution. Elephants arguably have better memories than we do.

What defines a person? And do we want to treat other species the way we treat members of our own?

Oh, like human males?

I think people would consider people to mean humans. As for the list of animals, chimps and octopusses are also considered quite intelligent. There are people who want the Great Apes to have some form of human rights, since their experiences and suffering are probably somewhat similar to ours. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_personhood
Some of the more intelligent social animals probably grieve for loss of family members. There have been cases of elephants attacking humans and livestock in retaliation for shooting their family years before. This sort of grief probably happens in other species such as the Great Apes and maybe wales/dolphins. I think that's a good enough reason not to hunt them, together with the sustainability issue.
The problem with this is that it might very well apply to pigs, and I don't think many people want to give up their meat.

I'm skeptical that pigs are as smart as people say. I keep on hearing that they're "creative". What evidence is there that they are creative?

Intelligent enough? Maybe. But until the day when we can communicate with them and they can tell us what they want on a political level, no they will not be considered people.

http://www.humanesociety.org/animals/pi ... html#smart
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/science/10angier.html

Well, Spain has already granted constitutional right to the Great Apes and legally recognise them as persons:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/06/25/us-spain-apes-idUSL256586320080625

There is also a movement by groups of scientists and philosophers who are trying to get cetaceans (including dolphins and whales) legally recognised as people:

http://maureenbelle.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/slavery-and-personhood-good-news-for-cetaceans-as-they-come-into-the-public-eye/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/world-17116882?SThisFB

At least we know that they are yummy.

Now, we'll just have to con these species into working and paying taxes.

why does it matter? i love spiders who i hate the appearance of.
the are innocent.

why do you consider that only intelligent beings are important?

i consider it to be very arrogant that people only are kind to intelligent beings. intelligence in no way makes a being more valuable than other beings.

are people who are smarter than i am worth more in the eyes of god than i am?

there are many more intelligent people than me, and am i supposed to lay down and sacrifice my life so that they may live?

i guess that the consensual answer may be "yes", but i can not help but want to live no matter how inferior i am to those above me who need me to die so they can harvest the resources that i need to preserve my life.

am i bad for not sacrificing my life so that superior people can use what i need to fuel my life so they can prevail while i perish?

many people would say yes. they feel more entitled to the resources i use to stay alive than me. they think they deserve my resources that keep me alive more than i do, and they would happily and without conscience starve me of my resources because they feel superior and more entitled because they have more intelligence than me.

i find that attitude to be the most ugly aspect of humanity.
people who think they have a greater right to live than other animals because they are more intelligent than them are hideous in my appraisal.

i am not very smart in the scheme of things, but i disdain people who would kill me in order to usurp my resources because they consider me to be less advantageous to the evolution of their species than they are.

i love animals very much and i do not consider myself to be superior to them.

Some kind of self-awareness, sentience and possibly intelligence are necessary conditions for personhood. Only persons have rights. At this juncture the only earth mammal that we recognize as a person are homo sapiens sapiens. I am asking if this view can be widened.

ruveyn

I just looked up "self-aware" in the dictionary. In my dictionary, their is no clear-cut definition for it. Does that mean that humans aren't quite sure of the definition of "self-aware"?

In my opinion, using intelligence and being able to realize that the images in a mirror are reflections are not valid representations of "personhood". Simply because a dog or a cat doesn't realize they are attacking their reflection, and not an intruder, doesn't mean they are not "self-aware". It simply means they do not realize they are looking at themselves. There are plenty of stupid humans in this world (ever hear of the Darwin Awards?), but we still consider them to be people.

I don't think that animals and humans are that different. The only two things that separate humans and other animals is the fact that humans have advanced technology, and they think they are superior to animals.

I don't think I have more of a right to exist than animals but I feel the instinct to try to exist. If it came to a choice between saving homo sapiens from extinction and saving pan troglodytes from extinction, I wouldn't hesitate to save humans. If only because I am a human and I want to live.

As to the OP, I don't think intelligence is the factor I consider when designating personhood. I am really speciesist about it and only think humans are people. I still respect other animals, though and I believe that humans are bettered by granting them certain rights.

I think "people" is the term we use for ourselves because we can communicate and agree with each other. We cannot communicate effectively with the other animals and so cannot assign them the same rights a person has. But I think because we are in control of the planet then we have a huge responsibility for the other animals, and plants and other life.

But I don't think we can give animals the same legal rights as humans. It would be unworkable.

We still have a lot to learn about dolphins, but here is a story:

Some researchers submerged microphones, suspended from buoys, into the ocean in a bay somewhere. Their purpose was to record dolphin vocalizations.

A pod of dolphins wandered up and stopped when they saw the forest of microphones. There was a bunch of vocalizations coming from all of them. Then this happened.

One dolphin made some noises at the others, and then went into the area with the microphones. He explored a bunch of them, touched them with his nose etc, and then after 15 minutes swam back. We vocalized alone for a minute or so, and then other dolphins, in turn, made vocalizations at him, and he responded. After a few minutes of this, the whole group swam into the field of microphones.

So, of course we can't know if they were talking or not, but it sure does seem like they were. This is not how other animals behave. This seems a lot more like a group of human hunter gatherers would behave when they came upon something strange. It seems like they all started with "What the F is that?" Then one of them drew the short straw and investigated. He came back, made a report, answered a bunch of questions, and then the group agreed to go in.

Here is a different question. If elves, the basic D&D Tolkeinesque type of elves, really existed, would they be people? They aren't human (well, they aren't real, but if they were). I think most humans would consider elves people, just a different kind of people. Dolphins and whales can be like that. We aren't sure, but we are learning an incredible amount about their vocalizations, and we may actually be able to produce devices that would let us talk to them in the next 10 years.

Are whales, dolphins, porpoises, and elephants intelligent enough to be considered people?

I don't know ... why don't we ask them?

Seriously.

Taking into account your links, it seems the main reason why people want to legally make these species "people" is to stop the hunting of them.

The issue is, we'd have to completely revamp our laws as people are given many, many rights and a lot of those rights wouldn't be able to be applied to non-humans such as the right to vote, right to bear arms (in the US), right to trial by jury, etc.

We should only give "people rights" to species that are able to exercise them or else we risk of going down a slippery slope. Instead, there would need to be a set of laws protecting species above a certain intelligence level (what level that would be, I don't know). The laws would protect these species from hunting and being used as entertainment.