Elephants and personhood

This article in Aeon by Don Ross argues that elephants may be capable of personhood, and that humans should help them develop that capability, if possible, by providing “cognitive scaffolding.” Ross is understandably upset that we’re destroying the environment that supports elephants. I agree with him there, but I don’t think elephants need to be helped to personhood as defined by humans.

Ross seems to find personhood valuable because we refer to killing persons as murder, and we think it’s wrong, but we don’t use that term for killing nonpersons. I’m not sure if he means that elephants would be safer if we considered them to be persons, but I think it’s pretty clear that they wouldn’t. Human persons are killed; we don’t even use the word murder all of the time. Sometimes we refer to killing as war, or collateral damage, or, if the person doing it is behind the wheel of a car, an accident, even if it was preventable and predictable. Sometimes we assume that it’s a necessary evil in the interest of something else, like technological progress or growth or liberty. We act as if some persons don’t matter as much as others. Being a person doesn’t mean all that much sometimes, especially when powerful interests are involved. Just ask the persons of Yemen, or Flint, or … well, you get the picture.

Given our moral confusion around persons, what gives us the moral or cognitive authority to decide that another species should be helped to realize what we define as personhood? We have every right, I suppose, to argue among ourselves about what a person is; we are, after all, the only ones on the planet who care. But do we have the right to decide that personhood is something that other species should aspire to?

We do possess the criteria for personhood that Ross identifies (language and the ability to regulate emotional responses in accordance with social norms, and to establish new norms to meet new situations). However, when you look at our behavior as a species, can you really say that those things mean that our type of cognition or morality is especially worthy of emulation? I’m reminded of the way Western missionaries and colonists thought that Christianity and Western civilization were so great that naturally everyone else would (or at least should) want to share them, that it was even a duty to bring them to people who didn’t know about them.

Even if we were as good as we think we are, what would give us the right to “help” another species develop in the same direction as we have? Elephants have the right to just be elephants without humans killing them for their tusks or taking the land they live on. (The same goes for less lovable or charismatic animals who will never be considered persons, by the way.) Rather than extending the circle of beings that we consider persons, can we start thinking in terms of accepting the intrinsic value of other living things, regardless of whether they’re persons or potential persons (or, for that matter, economically useful)?