Non human-human rights

steddyeddy wrote: »

What do people think of the great ape project , an initiative to give the non human apes basic human rights ie right to freedom, right to life and the prohibition of torture.

They definitely should have more rights. I'd extend that to other animals too.

In order to speed up the iniative three of the great apes, bonobo, chimp and gorilla, have been reclassified as hominind ( which scientifically speaking is false). the project has some big names behind it such as jane goodall, richard dawkins and a few bg legal minds.

Like you say it speeds up the initiative and that's a good thing. Science wise? Well the average person on the street won't know nor care about that, but it might change attitudes. That said I'd be concerned that the notion would become "fact" out of it.

Do you think this is viable, and as a side note do you think that human rights would be afforded to the neanderthal, homo erectus, floresiensis or the australopithecines?

I think emotionally people would automatically extend such rights as they all walked upright. A lot closer to home, no matter how un human they were in many respects, certainly the australopithecines, who would be upright chimps pretty much. With the others? Erectus(and flores man as a subspecies) were clearly intelligent and resourceful hominids. The first to leave Africa and wander. They may have had some abstract thought(a couple of tentative "venus figures have been found). Plus it looks like we interbred. Along with the recent discoveries of Neanderthal DNA in non African modern humans, there looks like a DNA exchange went on in Asia before that and that means Erectus. So human rights would be a given I would think. Neanderthal's an even clearer case. They had a sophisticated culture, in some ways ahead of our own at one stage if some recent discoveries of jewelry and body art in Spain are anything to go by. They also buried their dead so some philosophical/spiritual angle was at play. If they had survived extinction, no doubt we would have attempted to enslave them. We've a bad record in that area even with our own if we see them as lesser. Though Neanderthal's sheer phyisical strength may have made that more problematic. But either way if we found a bunch of them alive today they would be given the same rights as us. I suspect it would be more of an open and shut case than we think. They would be "human".