Battle of Ideas Debate on "Should Apes Have Rights/"

I was an invited speaker yesterday at a debate at the annual Battle of Ideas, run at the Royal College of Art in central London. Speaking against the motion I was aligned with Spiked editor Helene Guldberg whose book "Just Another Ape? has just come out, and Tipu Aziz, professor of neurosurgery at Oxford, who uses a lot of monkeys in his research to patent methods of direct electrode stimulation of the brain to cure Parkinsons. For the motion were veteran rights campaigner Richard Ryder - the man who coined the term "painism", and lawyer David Thomas. The debate was chaired by Stuart Derbyshire - a researcher, ironically, on pain, at the University of Birmingham.

I argued that recent cognitive psychology research suggests very strongly that humans are, as many of us of course suspect, genuinely exceptional with regards to what our minds can do - and far less genetically close to chimps than apes' rights campaigners would like us to believe. Ryder did not dispute that, but did dispute the idea that this gave us any reason to value ourselves more than the rest of the animal kingdom. His "painism" idea is a level playing field that requires us to extend rights to all creatures that we believe can feel pain. Both he and Thomas seemed at pains to suggest that they were not talking about rights in the law court, international statute sense of the word - but in a wider and more general sense of having interests that we should be aware of and protect. They were thus dodging the issue that "rights" in the hard legal sense is exactly what their colleagues in the Great Ape Project have been pursuing for apes in three legislatures recently - the government of the Balearics, New Zealand, and in the International Court of Human Rights in the Hague. Both Thomas and Ryder punted the old Peter SInger argument that tiny children or the very old - with Alzheimers disease - have rights even though they are incapable of fully understanding what they are - like chimpanzees - so why make an exception for humans? I have always found this attempt to equilibrate normal chimps with human elderly and mentally frail as particularly repugnant - doing no justice to either species - and it is also irrelevant because we know that infants will eventually grow into the fully functional adults that elderly people with Alzheimers disease once were. It seems to me that if you are going to talk about rights - flawed and often un-workable concept that it may be in human society - you have to talk about them in a legislative statute-book sense otherwise the whole debate lacks focus and what you are really talking about is "being nice to nature". And if you are talking about rights in the hard sense then obviously this is a farce with regard to non-human primates and other animals because they can have no concept of what a right is, cannot fight for them or defend them, and have no concept of the obligations to society that attends them.