An Unusual Institution
In the Netherlands a few years ago, an observer reported on the lives of some people confined in a new kind of institution. These people had a special condition that did not handicap them at all physically, but intellectually they were well below the normal human level; they could not speak, although they made noises and gestures. In the institutions in which such people were usually kept, they tended to spend much of their time making repetitive movements and rocking their bodies to and fro. This institution was an unusual one, in that its policy was to allow the inmates the maximum possible freedom to live their own lives and form their own community. This freedom extended even to sexual relationships, which led to pregnancy, birth, and child-rearing.
Under these circumstances the behavior of the inmates was far more varied than in the more conventional institutional settings. They rarely spent time alone, and they appeared to have no difficulty in understanding each other’s gestures and vocalizations. They were physically active, spending a lot of time outside, where they had access to about two acres of relatively natural forest surrounded by a wall. They cooperated in many activities, including, on one occasion—to the consternation of the supervisors—an attempt to escape that involved carrying a large fallen branch to one of the walls and propping it up as a kind of ladder, making it possible to climb over the wall.
The observer was particularly interested in what he called the “politics” of the community. A defined leader soon emerged. His leadership—and it was always a “he”—depended, however, on the support of other members of the group. The leader had privileges, but also, it seemed, obligations. He had to cultivate the favor of others by sharing food and other treats. Fights would develop from time to time, but they would usually be followed by some conciliatory gestures, so that the loser could be readmitted into the society of the leader. If the leader became isolated and allowed the others to form a coalition against him, his days as leader were numbered.
A simple ethical code could also be detected within the community. Its two basic rules, the observer commented, could be summed up as “One good turn deserves another,” and “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” The breach of the first of these rules apparently led to a sense of being wronged. For example, on one occasion Henk was fighting with Jan, and Gert came to Jan’s assistance. Later, Henk attacked Gert, who gestured to Jan for assistance, but Jan did nothing. After the fight between Gert and Henk was over, Gert furiously attacked Jan.
The mothers were, with one exception, competent at nursing and rearing their children. The mother-child relationships were close and lasted many years. The death of a baby led to prolonged grieving behavior. Because sexual relationships were not monogamous, it was not always possible to tell who the father of the child was, and fathers did not play a significant role in the rearing of the children.
In view of the very limited mental capacities that these inmates had been considered to possess, the observer was impressed by instances of behavior that clearly showed intelligent planning. In one example, two young mothers were having difficulty in stopping their small children from fighting. An older mother, a considerable authority figure in the community, was dozing nearby. One of the younger mothers woke her and pointed to the squabbling children. The older mother made the appropriate noises and gestures, and the children, suitably intimidated, stopped fighting. The older mother then went back to her nap.
In order to see just how far ahead these people could think, the observer devised an ingenious test of problem-solving ability. One inmate was presented with two series of five locked clear plastic boxes, each of which opened with a different, but readily identifiable, key. The keys were visible in the boxes. One series of five boxes led to a food treat, whereas the other series led to an empty box. The key to the first box in each series lay beside it. It was necessary to begin by choosing one of these two initial boxes; to succeed, one had to work mentally through the five boxes to see which initial choice would lead one to the box with the treat. The inmate was able to succeed in this complex task.
The inmates’ own awareness of what they were doing was well shown by their extensive practice of deceit. On one occasion, after a fight, it was noticeable that the loser limped badly when in the presence of the victor, but not when alone; presumably by pretending to be more seriously hurt than he really was, he hoped for some kind of sympathy, or at least mercy, from his conqueror.
But the most elaborate forms of deceit were concerned with—no surprise here for any observer of human behavior—sexual relationships. Although, as already mentioned, sexual relationships were not monogamous, the leader tried to prevent others from having sexual relationships with his favorites. To get around this, flirtations leading up to sexual intercourse were conducted with a good deal of discretion, so as not to attract the leader’s attention.
I have described this community in some detail because I want to raise an ethical question about the way in which people with this condition were regarded by those who looked after them. In the eyes of their supervisors the inmates did not have the same kind of right to life as normal human beings. Though treated with care and consideration for their welfare, they were seen as clearly inferior, and their lives were accorded much less value than the lives of normal human beings. When one of them was killed, in the course of a dispute over who should be leader, the killing was not considered equivalent to the killing of a normal human being. Moreover, in other institutions—not the one I have just described, but different ones, both in the Netherlands and overseas—people with this condition are deliberately infected with diseases such as hepatitis or AIDS, in order to test the efficacy of experimental drugs or vaccines. In some cases they die as a result of the experiment.
How should we regard this situation? Is it a moral outrage? Or is it right and proper, given the more limited intellectual capacities of these people?
Your answer to this question will almost certainly vary according to the mental image you formed of the inmates of the community I have described. I referred to them as “people.” In doing so I had in mind the definition of “person” offered by the seventeenth-century British philosopher John Locke: “A thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places.”1 But because the term “person,” like “people,” is commonly used only of members of the species Homo sapiens, my use of the term may have led you to think that the community I was describing was a community of intellectually disabled human beings. My use of Dutch names probably reinforced that assumption. In that case, you probably also thought it very wrong that the lives of these people were accorded less value than those of normal human beings, and the mention of their use as experimental subjects very likely caused shock and a sense of outrage.
Perhaps many of you, however, were able to guess that the description was not one of human beings at all. The “special condition” that these people have is their membership of the species Pan troglodytes. They are a community of chimpanzees, living in Arnhem Zoo.2 If you guessed this, you may not have been so shocked by what I told you about the way in which the supervisors thought of the value of life of the inmates as being markedly less than that of normal humans—perhaps not even by the use of the inmates in lethal experiments.
The distinction between human beings and all other animals is fundamental to our ethical attitudes toward ourselves, toward the rest of nature, and toward ethical problems of life and death. Here is an example of the way in which this distinction is taken to absurd lengths.
Whose Organs May We Take?
Baby valentina was born in Palermo, Italy, in April 1992. She was an anencephalic—that is, she was born with all of her brain, except the brain stem, missing. This meant that she would never be able to be conscious, to respond to her mother’s smile, or to experience anything at all. Such babies usually die within a few days of birth. Valentina’s parents, seeking to salvage something out of a birth that was so much less than they had expected, offered her as an organ donor. Amidst heated public debate, the Italian court ruled that this could not be permitted. To take the heart or any other vital organ from a living human being, even one with nothing more than a brain stem, would also not be allowed in other countries. So Baby Valentina died, and her organs could not be used to save any other babies.
Only two months after the death of Baby Valentina, in Pittsburgh, Dr. Thomas Starzl, a transplant surgeon, removed the liver from a healthy baboon and transplanted it into the heart of a man who was dying from a liver disease. The baboon, a healthy, sentient, intelligent, responsive animal, was killed immediately after the liver was taken; the patient died about two months later. No court stepped in to prevent the use of the baboon’s liver. Although some animal rights groups protested against the use of a baboon in this way, most of the discussion at the time brushed over the fact that the transplant had involved the death of a baboon, and focused instead on whether this procedure could offer new hope for a large number of people needing organ transplants.
The traditional sanctity-of-life ethic forbids us to kill and take the organs of a human being who is not, and never can be, even minimally conscious; and it maintains this refusal even when the parents of the infant favor the donation of the organs. At the same time, this ethic accepts without question that we may rear baboons and chimpanzees in order to kill them and use their organs. Why does our ethic draw so sharp a distinction between human beings and all other animals? Why does species membership make such a difference to the ethics of how we may treat a being?
The Western Tradition Under Attack
Many writers have described in detail how the Western tradition has put human beings on a pinnacle and separated them from the nonhuman animals. It was to humans that God gave dominion over the other animals; it was humans who were made in the image of God; and it was humans, and only humans, who had an immortal soul. For thousands of years, the human-centered Western tradition ruled without serious opposition. Then, in 1838, a young scientist wrote in his notebook:
Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity. More humble and, I believe, true to consider him created from animals.3
That young scientist was, of course, Charles Darwin. It took another thirty-three years until, with the publication of The Descent of Man, in 1871, he was prepared to say publicly what he had written in his notebook. And when he did, he undermined the foundations of the entire Western way of thinking on the place of our species in the universe. We now knew that we, too, were animals, and had a natural origin as the other animals did. We began to see the differences between us and the nonhuman animals as differences of degree, not of kind.
For a full century, the Western view of the special status of humans did the intellectual equivalent of defying gravity: its foundations had been knocked out from under it, and yet it continued to hang there. Then a series of further waves crashed against its weakened foundations, bringing much nearer to completion the task that Darwin began. This series of waves came from several directions in quick succession.
One wave came out of the new concern with the damage we are doing to the ecosystems of our planet, to other species of animals, and to our own air and water. This gave rise to a reassessment of our attitude to the natural world. Many voices were raised in favor of dethroning human beings from their dominion and reintegrating them with the natural world.
A second wave came in the 1970s with the emergence of the animal liberation or animal rights movement, which demanded an end to “speciesism.” That term, coined by the Oxford psychologist Richard Ryder in 1970 and popularized in my own book Animal Liberation, was used to draw a parallel between our attitudes to nonhuman animals and the attitudes of racists to those they regard as belonging to an inferior race.4 In both cases there is an inner group that justifies its exploitation of an outer group by reference to a distinction that lacks real moral significance. While acknowledging the acceptance of a basic principle of equality among all human beings as a progressive step, animal liberationists pointed out that the idea of human equality still left most sentient creatures outside the charmed circle. If we are now able to see that the fact that a human being belongs to a different race is not a good reason for giving less consideration to the interests of that being, then why, animal liberationists asked, should the fact that a being belongs to a different species be a good reason for doing so? The animal liberation movement demanded that we go beyond a speciesist morality and give equal consideration to the interests of all beings who can feel pleasure or pain, irrespective of species.
Within a decade of its founding, the animal liberation movement had grown remarkably, influencing public debate in every area of the treatment of animals, from product testing on animals to factory farming, the use of animals for fur and in circuses, and the whaling industry. Part of the strength of the movement was its solid philosophical base. The animal liberation movement is unique among recent political movements in the extent to which its ideas and support have come from academic philosophers. This has meant that the case against speciesism has been put more rigorously than might otherwise have been the case. Many philosophers now accept that a difference of species alone cannot provide an ethically defensible basis for giving the interests of one being more consideration than another. Their challenge to our automatic assumption of species superiority has had an impact on both our thought and our practice that goes far beyond their numbers.
A third wave came from our growing knowledge of nonhuman animals, and especially of the great apes. Jane Goodall was the first human being to be so well accepted by a group of free-living chimpanzees that she could spend hundreds of hours observing them at close range in their natural habitat. Dian Fossey carried out similar studies of gorillas in Rwanda. The work of these two women led to books read by millions and started a public fascination with our nearest relatives which has continued through films and television programs. Their observations have repeatedly broken down the barriers we have erected between ourselves and other animals. People used to say that one distinguishing mark of our species was that only humans use tools. Then Goodall saw chimpanzees use sticks in order to fish for termites inside a termite nest. Other scientists reported that some seals will use rocks in order to break open shellfish, and various birds use thorns or small sticks to probe insects out of bark. So we retreated a little, and said that only humans make tools. This point of demarcation collapsed when Goodall reported that chimpanzees do shape their sticks, by stripping off leaves and small branches until they get the right kind of implement for the task. Since then chimpanzees have been seen to make and use a variety of other tools; one has even used one stone to turn another stone into a sharp-edged cutting tool.
Many still regarded language as the decisive difference between us and them. Early attempts to teach chimpanzees to speak failed, because they simply do not have the vocal cords needed to produce words. When two American scientists brought an infant chimpanzee called Washoe into their home and raised her exactly as if she were a deaf human child, using American Sign Language to communicate with her and with each other in her presence, they found that she learned to understand and use a large number of signs. When she matured and had an adoptive son, she taught him signs, which he then used to communicate with other chimpanzees as well as with humans. Washoe has also been filmed signing to herself when no one else is around. Gorillas and orangutans have also learned American Sign Language. Koko, a gorilla, has a vocabulary of over one thousand words and can understand a much larger number of words in spoken English as well. Chantek, an orangutan, used signs to tell lies. For example, he stole a pencil eraser, put it in his mouth, and signed “food eat,” as if to say that he had swallowed it. He had really kept the eraser in his cheek, and later it was found in his bedroom in a place where he commonly hid things. Although there have been attempts to suggest that what the apes are doing is not “really” language but just a response to cues provided by human beings, the immense amount of data now accumulated, including the data on apes signing to each other or to themselves when no humans are around, now make this explanation untenable.5
What may prove the final blow to the traditional Western view of the distinctness of human beings is now coming from new knowledge in genetics and its implications for the way scientists classify humans and our nearest ancestors. For many years, most biologists assumed that humans evolved as a separate branch from the other great apes, including the chimpanzees and gorillas. This was a natural enough assumption, given that in many ways they look more like each other than they look like us. More recent techniques in molecular biology have enabled us to measure quite precisely the degree of genetic difference between different animals. We now know that we share 98.4 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. This is a very slight genetic difference. It is, for example, less than that between two different species of gibbon, which are separated by 2.2 percent; or between the red-eyed and white-eyed vireos, two closely related North American bird species, the genes of which differ by 2.9 percent. More significant still is the fact that the difference between us and chimpanzees is less than the 2.3 percent that separates the DNA of chimpanzees from that of gorillas. In other words, we—not the gorillas—are the chimpanzees’ nearest relatives. And all of the African apes—chimpanzees, gorillas, and humans—are more closely related to each other than any of them are to orangutans.
On the basis of this discovery, some leading scientists, among them Richard Dawkins, lecturer in zoology at the University of Oxford, and Jared Diamond, professor of physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, have proposed that we should change the way we classify ourselves and the other African apes. As we presently classify ourselves, not only are humans a separate species, Homo sapiens, but we also have our own genus, Homo, and even our own family (the next grouping up), Hominidae. Our nearest relative, the chimpanzee, is not Homo but Pan (there are two species, Pan troglodytes, the common chimpanzee, and Pan paniscus, the pygmy chimpanzee or Gonobo), while the gorilla is a separate family, Gorilla gorilla, and the apes as a whole belong to the family Pongidae. We now have decisive evidence that this categorization has no basis other than the desire to separate us from other animals. All taxonomists agree that the two species of gibbon belong in the same genus, and the same is true of the red-eyed and white-eyed vireos. We are closer to the chimpanzees than the different species of gibbons, or the different species of vireos, are to each other. We are also approximately as close to the gorillas as these different species are to each other. There is only one proper conclusion to draw: we belong in the same genus as the chimpanzees and gorillas. Since the rules of naming in zoology give priority to the name that was first proposed, this means that the two species of chimpanzee should be renamed Homo troglodytes and Homo paniscus, and the gorilla, Homo gorilla. As Jared Diamond has put it, we are “the third chimpanzee.”6
The Great Ape Project
All of this means that the time has come for a new idea: to extend the moral community beyond human beings to chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. The “community of equals” would then embrace all the great apes, not only members of our own species. By “community of equals,” Paola Cavalieri and I—the cofounders of the Great Ape Project—mean the moral community within which the most basic ethical and legal principles apply to all members. At present, in every civilized human society, only human beings are recognized as having a right to life, a right not to be tortured, and a right not to be imprisoned without due process. Internationally accepted ethical standards recognize that all humans have these basic rights—and that only humans have them. The central tenet of the Great Ape Project is that it is ethically indefensible to deny the great apes these basic rights.
Some will laugh at the idea of extending fundamental “human” rights to chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. But in 1821, the House of Commons broke into howls of laughter when Richard Martin, the passionate member for Galway, proposed a law to protect horses from ill treatment, and Alderman C. Smith suggested that asses should be given protection as well. The argument from ridicule is too facile. What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.
Many will say that it is wrong to concern ourselves with extending rights to apes when so many humans are unable to enjoy the basic rights that, under various United Nations Declarations, they already hold. That human beings need better protection from murder, arbitrary imprisonment, and torture is undeniable; but why is this a reason for not doing anything about the rights of those outside our species? When I urge that developed nations ought to be giving far more to help those in danger of starvation in third world nations, I often get the reply: “Don’t we have enough people in need of help right here at home?” Yes, we do, but if we waited until everything was perfect at home, we would never do anything for those farther away, where the need is often greater and the remedy more apparent. The same applies to our efforts to stop the killing, arbitrary confinement, and infliction of pain and disease on the great apes. They cannot wait until we have dealt with all abuses of human beings.
Those who know my book Animal Liberation may wonder why I now seem to be prepared to restrict my campaign for equality to the great apes. After all, the central thesis of Animal Liberation is that the basic principle of equality that entitles us to regard all human beings as equal—the principle of equal consideration of interests—ought to be applied to all beings who have interests. Since all beings capable of experiencing pleasure and pain have interests, this includes all mammals, indeed all vertebrates, and probably many invertebrates as well. The book focuses especially on the exploitation of animals in intensive farms and laboratories. Since none of the great apes are farmed and the few thousand great apes—mainly chimpanzees—in laboratories make up an insignificant proportion of the millions of animals used in research, the great apes barely rate a mention in Animal Liberation. What has made me narrow my focus so dramatically?
I have not changed my views about extending the basic principle of equality to all sentient beings, but this will inevitably be a long and slow process. All over the world people are involved in raising and killing sentient animals for food. The extension of the community of equals to all sentient beings will remain politically impossible for a long time to come, no matter how strong the ethical arguments for such an extension may be. By comparison, the step advocated by the Great Ape Project is relatively modest. It would stop experimentation on chimpanzees, the confinement of gorillas in sterile zoo cages, and the pathetic displays of orangutans for entertainment purposes, but on the whole it would not upset any major industry or population of voters. It seems reasonable to hope that the idea of granting basic rights to the other great apes could, over the next few years, gain strong political support on an international level. Yet to extend the community of equals would, at the same time, be a historic breakthrough in our thinking. The Great Ape Project is not an appeal to save endangered animals before they become extinct or a plea for more humane treatment. It is a call to respect the rights of individual animals in the same way that we respect the rights of human beings. This is something that has never happened before. Its achievement would make a breach in the species barrier that would, in time, make it easier to reach out to other nonhuman beings.
The Great Ape Project is also a book, now available in English, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, that centers on a “Declaration on the Great Apes,” setting out the position I have just outlined. It includes thirty-four essays by distinguished scientists, philosophers, and others, indicating why they support the declaration. Many of the most powerful essays come from those who have been close to great apes, either in the wild or by communicating with them through sign language, in the way I have already described. In his contribution Geza Teleki, chairman of the Washington-based Committee for Conservation and Care of Chimpanzees, describes an evening in the Gombe hills, where he had gone to study chimpanzees under the guidance of Jane Goodall. As he sat on a grassy ridge watching the sun sink over Lake Tanganyika, two adult male chimpanzees climbed the ridge from opposite sides. As they met at the top they stood upright, face to face, and clasped hands, while softly panting. Then they sat down together and joined Teleki in watching the sunset.
Such first moments reveal only a glimpse of what our nearest relatives are like. After twenty-five years of watching chimpanzees in the Mahale Mountains of Tanzania, Toshisada Nishida still observes forms of behavior that are totally new and that, as he writes, “continue to be the source of astonishment, interest and pleasure.”7 The apes who have learned sign language also continue to display previously undreamed-of capacities. Washoe, a chimpanzee, was reared from infancy by Allen and Beatrice Gardner, who taught her to use sign language. When she was five years old, they sent her away with Roger and Deborah Fouts to an institution in Oklahoma. It was eleven years before they saw Washoe again. When, after that time, they unexpectedly entered the room where she was, Washoe signed their name signs, then signed “Come Mrs. G,” led Beatrice Gardner to an adjoining room, and began to play a game with her that she had not been observed playing since she left the Gardners’ home.
Where does all this lead, in ethical and political terms? In our own concluding essay to The Great Ape Project, Paola Cavalieri and I point to an international organization that can serve as a political model for the liberation of the great apes: the Anti-Slavery Society. In the last two hundred years, human slavery has been eliminated, or virtually so, from the face of the earth. In laboratories, zoos, circuses, and elsewhere, the great apes remain the most abject of slaves. In 1991, the United States government set official minimum standards for cages for laboratory chimpanzees. The recommended cage size for permanently confining a single adult chimpanzee was 5×5×7 feet.
Can we put an end to the slavery of the great apes? Since the launch of the Great Ape Project in 1993 there have been promising signs of change in attitudes toward the nonhuman great apes. In Britain, the government has said that it will no longer allow great apes to be the subject of harmful scientific experimentation. In the United States, a National Science Foundation report on chimpanzees in laboratories recommended that—in contrast to the methods normally applied to other animals used in research—chimpanzees surplus to research requirements should not be killed but should be “retired.” In New Zealand, animal welfare legislation enacted in 1999 included a clause prohibiting the use of “non-human hominoids”—that is, great apes—in research, unless the research was intended to benefit them, either individually or as a species. In hailing the legislation as a world first, the government minister responsible for its passage through parliament specifically referred to “the advanced cognitive and emotional capacity of the great apes” as the reason for the special status being accorded to them.
These are the early signs of what could become a more fundamental change. It needs to happen soon, not only for the sake of those apes now enslaved in the developed world, but also for those still living freely in their original lands. In Africa, and in Indonesia, the great apes are everywhere endangered by the clearing and burning of the forests in which they live. In Africa chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas face an additional threat: foreign logging companies are building roads into the forests, providing access for hunters who shoot them for “bushmeat,” often to be sold at high prices in markets and restaurants hundreds of miles away. If this trade is not stopped soon, there will be very few free-living African apes left.
Extending the community of equals to the great apes is a first step toward the broader moral community that should eventually include all sentient creatures. We imagine that there is a vast gulf between us and other species. This gulf has disastrous consequences not only for the great apes, but for all animals. The Great Ape Project is not merely the champion of the one relatively small group of animals over others, but rather a bridge that will reduce this gulf, and so lead to a different attitude toward all sentient creatures.8