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  Implications of Granting Some Animals Rights

  “Many of the animals that I’ve written about are animals that are not indigenous to the United States and of which there are relatively few of them: African grey parrots, African elephants, the four species of great apes, dolphins. If you gave the basic right to bodily integrity and bodily liberty, there would be certain ramifications: you couldn’t keep them in zoos or aquariums, you couldn’t use them in biomedical research, you’d have to act in a way that respected them .” – Steve Wise

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  Ideal Kind of Judge for Changing the Law

  “Our most famous judges are Principal judges. The ones who say, ‘This is right and the law needs to right’. The judges who say, ‘This is how it’s been done for 800 years this is how it’s going to be done now’ are not the famous judges of our world. It’s the ones who changed something because it had gone out of fashion, it had gone out of date, become archaic. And so you want to go in front of those judges.” – Steve Wise

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  Slippery Slope

  “It’s not a slippery slope, it’s simply the way the common law works.” – Steve Wise

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  The Principle of Equality (extended version)

  “Here you have human beings who basically have no autonomy, no consciousness, no sentience at all being treated as legal persons with a whole panoply of rights. And here you have, say chimpanzees or bonobos, who are pygmy chimpanzees, who are extraordinarily cognitively complex, who have autonomy, who should have dignity, and yet they’re treated as things. So as a matter of equality there is something wrong here.”   – Steve Wise Please note: There are two versions of this clip. For the shorter version, please see The Principle of Equality.

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  One Approach to Rights: Proportionality Rights

  “The thing about Proportionality Rights is that they are real rights…You have fewer rights but you have rights that have been cut down in a way that still leaves you as a legal person, not as a legal thing. You’re not owned by anybody and you’re not a slave.” – Steve Wise

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  Aristotle’s Axiom

  “When I was trying to understand how it was that people throughout time have struggled with how do you place people in hierarchies…One thing I noticed was that every single person who devised a theory of hierarchy, always placed the group in which he was a member…at the top. “ – Steve Wise

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  Basic Criteria for Rights

  “The arguments I make, at least as a sufficient condition for rights is the idea of practical autonomy: that you can desire, that you can act intentionally, that you have some kind of an understanding that your desires are being fulfilled. In order to have that level of cognitive complexity, you have to at least be conscious.” – Steve Wise

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  What’s Behind Opposition to Animal Rights?

  “It’s one thing to say I like animals, or animals should have rights or shouldn’t have rights. But the fact is if they do have rights, that means you are going to have to act differently toward them…the way people had to act differently towards humans who were slaves once they became free.” Steve Wise

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  Preparing for Animal Rights

  “What I can do is show that within the normal range of legal discourse, the arguments for the basic legal rights of nonhuman animals exists.” – Steve Wise

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