Should animals bear criminal responsibility? Do they have rights as well?

It’s not animals that interest me so much as robots and AIs. But let’s set that aside while we look at this article:

Ed Simon, If animals are persons, should they bear criminal responsibility? Psyche/Aeon.

From the essay:

Dismissing animal trials as just another backwards practice of a primitive time is to our intellectual detriment, not only because it imposes a pernicious presentism on the past, but also because it’s worth considering whether or not the broader implications of such a ritual don’t have something to tell us about different ways of understanding nonhuman consciousness, and the rights that our fellow creatures deserve. From our metaphysics, then, can come our ethics, and from our ethics can derive politics and law. There need not be a return of animals to the stand as defendants, but they’ve already had legal representation as plaintiffs. The Nonhuman Rights Project, led by the US attorney Steven Wise, has filed briefs on behalf of creatures such as the four captive chimpanzees Tommy, Kiko, Hercules and Leo in New York in 2013, and more recently Happy the elephant, a solitary pachyderm at the Bronx Zoo.

Later:

The possibility that an animal could be found either innocent or guilty evidences a formidable respect for nonhuman consciousness, a sense that, despite their profound otherness, they are still invested with the powers of thought and intentionality. Contrasting modernity’s largely instrumental understanding of animal-hood, whereby their only functions are as pets, beasts of burden or food, Evans argues that in ‘ancient and medieval times domestic animals were regarded as members of the household and entitled to the same legal protection as human vassals,’ concluding that, before the Enlightenment, animals were ‘invested with human rights and inferentially endowed with human responsibilities’. None of this is to pretend that scholastic theologians were somehow nascent PETA ideologues; meat may have been expensive and rare on peasant tables, but there were precious few vegans during the Middle Ages. Rather, it is to claim that culturally and theologically there was an understanding of animals – their individual uniqueness and independence, as well as their relationship to humanity – that was arguably more sophisticated than the dominate schema that came to prevail.

Now things get interesting:

To claim that an animal is a type of intricate robot – a demonstrable falsehood for anyone who has ever had a dog or cat – is both a less true and a more pernicious myth than the one that puts a pig on trial. It would be both overly reductionist and unfair to blame René Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637) for the widespread instrumental view of animal worth. More accurate to say that Descartes either anticipated or took part in a burgeoning shift of modernity that increasingly separated humanity from the animal kingdom of which we are a part, and which did so by rendering our fellow animals as without voice, without mind, without worth beyond what they can do for us.

But we are now living in an age where we must ask: What about intricate robots? Do they have moral standing? Do they have rights, a question that has been addressed in various ways here at New Savanna?

What about Lake Erie, is it a juridical person? We’re living in a topsy-turvy world which poses such questions to us.

There is more at the link.

H/t 3QD.