The Great Ape Project

318 Pages·1994·13.4 MB·English

by  Peter Singer

Author off'
Animal
The
Great Ape Project

The
Great Ape Project
Equality beyond Humanity
Edited by Paola Cavalieri
and Peter Singer
ST. M ARTIN’S PRESS
NEW YORK
the great ape project. Copyright © 1993 by the individual contributors.
This collection copyright © 1993 by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of
America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical
articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s
Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Great ape project : equality beyond humanity / edited by Peter Singer.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-10473-1
1. Animal rights. 2. Animal rights movement. I. Singer, Peter.
HV4711.G73 1994
179'. 3— dc20 93-35892 CIP
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate Limited.
First U.S. Edition: January 1994
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface 2
A Declaration on Great Apes 4
I Encounters with Free-living Apes
1 Chimpanzees — Bridging the Gap 2 0
Jane Goodall
2 Meeting a Gorilla 2 9
Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
3 Chimpanzees Are Always New to Me 24
Toshisada Nishida
II Conversations with Apes
4 Chimpanzees’ Use of Sign Language 28
Roger S. Fouts and Deborah H. Fouts
5 Language and the Orang-utan: The Old ‘Person’
of the Forest 42
H. Lyn White Miles
6 The Case for the Personhood of Gorillas 58
Francine Patterson and Wendy Gordon
III Similarity and Difference
7 Gaps in the Mind 80
Richard Dawkins
VI The Great Ape Project
8 The Third Chimpanzee 88
Jared Diamond
9 Common Sense, Cognitive Ethology and
Evolution 102
Marc Bekoff
10 What’s in a Classification? 109
R. I. M. Dunbar
11 Apes and the Idea of Kindred 113
Stephen R. L. Clark
12 Ambiguous Apes 126
Raymond Corbey
13 Spirits Dressed in Furs? 137
Adriaan Kortlandt
IV Ethics
14 Apes, Humans, Aliens, Vampires and Robots 146
Colin McGinn
15 Why Darwinians Should Support Equal Treatment for
Other Apes 152
James Rachels
16 Profoundly Intellectually Disabled Humans and
the Great Apes: A Comparison 158
Christoph Anstotz
17 Who’s Like Us? 173
Heta Hayry and Matti Hayry
18 A Basis for (Interspecies) Equality 183
Ingmar Persson
Contents
Vll
19 Ill-gotten Gains 194
Tom Regan
20 The Ascent of Apes — Broadening the Moral
Community 206
Bernard E. Rollin
21 Sentientism 220
Richard D. Ryder
22 Great Apes and the Human Resistance to
Equality 223
Dale Jamieson
V Apes as Persons
23 The Wahokies 230
Harlan B. Miller
24 Humans, Nonhumans and Personhood 237
Robert W. Mitchell
25 Personhood, Property and Legal Competence 248
Gary L. Francione
26 Great Apes as Anthropological Subjects —
Deconstructing Anthropocentrism 258
Barbara Noske
27 Aping Persons — Pro and Con 269
Steve F. Sapontzis
VI Reality
28 Items of Property 280
David Cantor
The Great Ape Project
Vlll
29 The Chimp Farm 291
Betsy Swart
30 They Are Us 296
Geza Teleki
VII Epilogue
The Great Ape Project — and Beyond 304
Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer
Preface
We are human, and we are also great apes. Our membership of the
human species gives us a precious moral status: inclusion within the
sphere of moral equality. Those within this sphere we regard as entitled
to special moral protection. There are things that we may not do to
them. They have basic rights that are denied to those outside this sphere.
This book urges that in drawing the boundary of this sphere of moral
equality, we should focus not on the fact that we are human beings, but
rather on the fact that we are intelligent beings with a rich and varied
social and emotional life. These are qualities that we share not only with
our fellow humans, but also with our fellow great apes. Therefore, we
should make membership of this larger group sufficient entitlement for
inclusion within the sphere of moral equality. We seek an extension of
equality that will embrace not only our own species, but also the species
that are our closest relatives and that most resemble us in their capaci­
ties and their ways of living.
This step is a cautious one: there are relatively few great apes in the
world, and to extend equality to them would require a much more
modest rearrangement of our lives than, say, the extension of equality to
all mammals. Some people, among them some of the contributors to this
book, would like to see a much larger extension of the moral commu­
nity, so that it includes a wider range of nonhuman animals. Our
epilogue suggests one way in which this project might have a signifi­
cance that is wider than its immediate aim. This immediate aim is,
though limited, still a step of true historical importance. As the essays in
this book demonstrate, we now have sufficient information about the
capacities of chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans to make it clear that
the moral boundary we draw between us and them is indefensible.
Hence the time is ripe for extending full moral equality to members of
other species, and the case for so doing is overwhelming.
For support in our project we wrote not only to people who know
nonhuman apes well, from long periods of observing them or from
communicating with them, but also to academics from many different