Thanks for the incisive comments! In the novel, the deodands do not have fixed identities and are nested inside one another. They're systems rather than individuals, so deer are not protected from wolves; wolves and deer may each have their own deodands to advocate for them in the human world, but there is a larger wolves-sheep deodand that represents them as a system, and so on up to the planetary level. I did not have time to go into many of these details in the novel (it was overloaded with explanation as it was) but identity works differently for them; it's also not a simple hierarchy but a complex network, reflecting our real ecosystem.
I like this a lot, but I question one of the fundamental premises. Do we need more people focused on creating new rights, or do we need more people focused on fulfilling pre-existing duties?
It's true that *human* rights need to be buttressed and applied more evenly. The general question is whether it is possible to preserve the natural world in a legal regime that focuses solely on the rights of humans. This is what I call the "fox guarding the henhouse" problem: ultimately, in such a regime, natural systems are subordinate to human needs. An argument can always be made for exploiting those systems based upon short-term human needs, even though such exploitation amounts to stealing the future from our descendants.
I found your thinking intriguing and went down a rabbit hold reading deodands an stolen. But your personhood would let an invasive horde of cats upset an ecosystem’s balance, it would not quarantine a herd of infectious animals and eradicate them as a threat, and it would not let predators cull herbivores and thus not restore the rivers as with wolves in yellowstone. Personhood of animals has be contained within ecoystem level management
(This might be a duplication; I thought I'd replied but it didn't seem to show up.) You manage to hit on one of the major problems with this kind of thinking. If there are clear boundaries to personhood in the case of natural systems, then their rights can collide. I think it's important to think of it in terms of nested systems: the wolves have rights, so do the deer, but the deer-wolf system is itself an ecological dynamic that actually sustains both populations in balance, so it has its own rights. Hopefully we don't get a pyramid of rights with some kind of "Gaia" monster AI at the top slaughtering creatures and people at will to sustain 'balance.' I see more of a network, as ecosystems actually are; but legally, deodands can't be atomic entities, they have to be able to overlap, nest inside one another, etc.
Thanks for the incisive comments! In the novel, the deodands do not have fixed identities and are nested inside one another. They're systems rather than individuals, so deer are not protected from wolves; wolves and deer may each have their own deodands to advocate for them in the human world, but there is a larger wolves-sheep deodand that represents them as a system, and so on up to the planetary level. I did not have time to go into many of these details in the novel (it was overloaded with explanation as it was) but identity works differently for them; it's also not a simple hierarchy but a complex network, reflecting our real ecosystem.
Thank you for writing this!!🌱
I like this a lot, but I question one of the fundamental premises. Do we need more people focused on creating new rights, or do we need more people focused on fulfilling pre-existing duties?
It's true that *human* rights need to be buttressed and applied more evenly. The general question is whether it is possible to preserve the natural world in a legal regime that focuses solely on the rights of humans. This is what I call the "fox guarding the henhouse" problem: ultimately, in such a regime, natural systems are subordinate to human needs. An argument can always be made for exploiting those systems based upon short-term human needs, even though such exploitation amounts to stealing the future from our descendants.
Thanks Karl. There are ecosystem management protocols. Unesco’s biosphere reserve management are good ones that allow for actual system management
I found your thinking intriguing and went down a rabbit hold reading deodands an stolen. But your personhood would let an invasive horde of cats upset an ecosystem’s balance, it would not quarantine a herd of infectious animals and eradicate them as a threat, and it would not let predators cull herbivores and thus not restore the rivers as with wolves in yellowstone. Personhood of animals has be contained within ecoystem level management
(This might be a duplication; I thought I'd replied but it didn't seem to show up.) You manage to hit on one of the major problems with this kind of thinking. If there are clear boundaries to personhood in the case of natural systems, then their rights can collide. I think it's important to think of it in terms of nested systems: the wolves have rights, so do the deer, but the deer-wolf system is itself an ecological dynamic that actually sustains both populations in balance, so it has its own rights. Hopefully we don't get a pyramid of rights with some kind of "Gaia" monster AI at the top slaughtering creatures and people at will to sustain 'balance.' I see more of a network, as ecosystems actually are; but legally, deodands can't be atomic entities, they have to be able to overlap, nest inside one another, etc.