Personhood: Who's Next?
Canada just celebrated its 84th anniversary of declaring women "persons" within the meaning of the law. Linda Greenhouse wrote about admiring the "living tree" metaphor of this law, which has grown and adapted along with developments in compassion and understanding through the years. Greenhouse likened it to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Kennedy's view that "...if the framers [of the U.S. Constitution] knew all the specifics of a just society, they would have written them down.” Consistent with an evolving sense of compassion and understanding, this year India's Ministry of Environment and Forests recommended* that dolphins be declared " non-human persons " due to their "unusually high intelligence" with "their own specific rights." Hopefully other countries and cetaceans will follow, consistent with the Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans written by scientists of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .