April 28, 2014 at 1:40 P.M. This morning I attempted to complete a telephone call to Invicta Watch Company in South Florida -- a territory where, I am told, Cuban-American politicians hold sway -- specifically, from my home number to 1-800-327-7682 at about 9:49 A.M.
I waited the required time on-line only to find that my call was "dropped" at the last minute before it could be answered by an Invicta employee. Repeated attempts to make the call resulted in the same outcome.
Since this is a long-distance call, for me, and since I doubt that (through no fault of Invicta which, probably, welcomes the opportunity to make money!), I will probably not be able to call Invicta, at any time, I have decided to send a certified letter with return receipt to the company -- a letter which I will also post at these blogs.
Regrettably, I am prevented from accessing my email accounts and cannot send (or receive) electronic communications for reasons (if any) that are not explained to me. The size of the text in this essay will be altered by hackers from New Jersey and Miami. ("How censorship works in America.")
It may be that these experiences are only a coincidence. Alternatively, "Muhammad" at Time/Warner may now be employed at Invicta. No doubt the Cuban American National Foundation and Ms. Ros-Leghtinen or Mr. Menendez can clarify this mystery.
I have only the highest regard for Invicta's personnel and their watches, which are among the finest and most reasonably-priced in the world, and look forward to doing more business with the company in the future as well as resolving my current minor problem.
An essay will be posted soon responding to the continuing controversy surrounding the claim of "Tommy" the chimp (Mr. Rubio?) to be regarded as a person with full legal rights. ("Marco Rubio Lies About His Past!" and "Menendez Consorts With Underage Prostitutes" then "Does Senator Menendez have mafia friends?" and "Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba.")
Invicta sells watches and has no opinions on political issues of any kind beyond hoping that everyone buys an Invicta watch.
My discussion of "Tommy's" legal odyssey is based on the articles listed below. "Tommy" owns and wears a Rolex which, in my opinion, is less good than my Invicta and costs much more. I have offered the observation to "Tommy" that Rolex does not make watches in Taiwan.
William C. Rhoden, "A Disturbing Tape and a Potential Moral Quandary," The Sunday New York Times, Sports Sunday, April 27, 2014, p. 1.
Charles Siebert, "His Day in Court," The New York Times Magazine, April 27, 2014, p. 28. ("Charles Siebert" is "Manohla Dargis" and "Jennifer Shuessler.")
Concerning the metaphysics of the person, or "personhood" as a jurisprudential or philosophical category, the following works may be useful:
David Braine, The Human Person: Animal and Spirit (Indiana: Notre Dame U. Press, 1992), pp. 340-350.
Teilhard De Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (London: Collins, 1959), entirety.
Kenan Malik, Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us About Human Nature (London: Phoenix, 2000), p. 25.
Ervin H. Pollock, Jurisprudence (Columbus: Ohio U. Press, 1979), pp. 233-301.
A.O. Rorty, Ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: U. Cal. Press, 1976). (Please see Daniel Dennett's "The Conditions of Personhood" and Bernard Williams' "Persons, Character and Morality.")
A.O. Rorty, Ed., Explaining Emotions (Berkeley: U. Cal. Press, 1980), p. 299.
Roger Scruton, "Persons," in An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 39-53.
P.F. Strawson, Individuals (New York: Anchor Books, 1963), ch. 3 "Persons."
On December 5, 2013 I posted an essay at this blog ("Ape and Essence") examining the issue of whether a chimpanzee named "Tommy" could bring a legal action claiming the status of a "person," under the law, so as to be "liberated" from confinement in what I take to be an adequate animal shelter in New York.
I predicted at that time that this law suit would be dismissed on the pleadings, either for lack of standing (no "in personam" jurisdiction?) for "Tommy," or by way of summary judgment for the defendants due to a "failure to state a cause of action." Legally, property cannot be "confined" (even if it can be seized) "without due process of law." Eminent domain requires compensation for a seizure to the owner, not to the property.
None of this applies if you happen to be one of the undisputed persons "confined" at Guantanamo prison or, worse, someone killed by a U.S. drone without explanations, charges, or evidence of any kind. Also, many persons, like me, find themselves in legal blackholes interfered with, damaged, or injured by public officials for secret reasons, or held illegally, killed, or "disappeared" in one of America's numerous "black sites." ("Glen Greenwald's Partner Detained" and "America's Torture Lawyers" and "American Doctors and Torture.")
Persons in all of these groups and many others may be far worse off than "Tommy." Mr. Wise, counsel for "Tommy" -- if such a thing is possible -- seems somewhat deranged to me: Khalid Al-Masri lacks standing to sue the U.S. government for being tortured by American intelligence agents by "mistake." However, "Tommy's" lack of standing keeps Professor Wise awake at night.
Mr. Wise seems unconcerned about those many human beings who may benefit from his services and his students' efforts, such as the thousands of African-American defendants and inmates falsely convicted in the American legal system and languishing in prisons that are far worse places than the cages housing "Tommy" and his fellow chimpanzees. ("Justice For Mumia Abu-Jamal" and "Albert Florence and New Jersey's Racism.")
Some of these individuals are convicted because of inadequate representation and others receive excellent representation and are convicted anyway because of racism. ("America's Holocaust" and "Louis C. Taylor Serves 42 Years as an Innocent Man.")
Many women in America are certainly treated more violently and with less regard for their welfare or rights than "Tommy." ("Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey" and "Not One More Victim.")
Professor Wise teaches law somewhere (Boston University?) and he has not been charged with ethics violations for bringing this absurd and, I believe, offensive litigation. He is very fortunate. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?")
In my comment on this -- perhaps, unintentionally -- highly amusing article, I will focus on a few of the absurdities and errors in the text: First, there are a number of conceptual confusions equating persons and personhood with the legal fiction of person-status based on public policy goals that always need to be clarified; second, there are procedural issues that, as I anticipated, preclude the matter from being heard in any U.S. courtroom and will always do so. In other words, the problems with this law suit are -- and will remain -- dispositive for Mr. Wise and "Tommy." Third, social policy considerations cut against granting the status of person to chimpanzees even if courts wish to protect animals. Besides, separation of powers issues kick-in. Only a legislature could enact into law such a radical transformation of American jurisprudence as extending the ontological and moral status of "person" to chimpanzees and/or other animals.
Mr. Wise tends to confuse being a person (in a metaphysical sense) or legal theory, within the natural law tradition that provides the basis for "rights talk," with the fictional status of person that allows for SOME legal rights of human beings to be shared with, say, corporations for limited public policy purposes.
The basis for the Bill of Rights protections was the humanism of the Enlightenment as expressed in America's Constitutional law, notably in the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery that applies exclusively to human beings as persons. ("What is Enlightenment?" and "Manifesto For the Unfinished American Revolution.")
Underlying the rights recognized in law is a concept of human persons as self-determining or autonomous in a moral sense and therefore free agents capable of transcendence. No research into the cognitive capacities of apes is relevant to what is essentially a moral and jurisprudential determination that human persons ALONE are moral subjects burdened with responsibility as a locus of obligations and claims upon others as well as the state regardless of their physical condition. Again: this is about capacity for humanity. The mere capacity for agency and transcendence confers responsibilities and entitlements. ("Robert Brandom's 'Reason in Philosophy.'")
The following comment by Mr. Wise is not only mistaken, it is so absurd as to border on insanity:
" ... because animals are not legal persons, they don't even have the capacity to sue in the first place. [Precisely.] They're totally invisible. [Their owners are visible and may express concern for their welfare.] I knew that if I was going to begin to break down the wall that divides human and non-humans, I first had to find a way around this issue of personhood." (p. 32.)
If this statement is sincere, I suggest that Mr. Wise see a psychiatrist. To tear down the metaphysical and ethical wall between animals and human beings means not that "Tommy" will learn to play bridge and develop an interest in Opera, but that selected human beings will be reduced in the "thinking" of persons, like Donald Sterling, to the status of animals. Accordingly, some persons who are disliked by the powerful will seem less human, more like "Tommy," making it unimportant what we do to them. This was the view of Dr. Josef Mengele as regards the Jewish children he had no trouble torturing to death. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
Millions of animals are grown for food in a world where millions of humans nevertheless starve to death; billions of animals and fish or insects may find lawyers willing to represent them flooding American courts with further law suits since judges have so little to do already. Realistically, the rights sought for "Tommy" and all other animals will (and should) never come into existence.
While "Tommy" merits our concern and protection merely because he can feel pain, this protection is about human morality and law, motivated by our concern to avoid cruelty or causing suffering unnecessarily to any sentient being -- among sentient beings are illiterate young men tortured in prisons and young women forced to sell their bodies to survive in America. Let us worry about such unfortunate human beings before we worry about "Tommy." ("Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey" and "Not One More Victim.")
Procedurally, Mr. Wise has brought a writ of habeas corpus which is usually filed in criminal cases against the state for the release of a person held illegally. Mr. Wise assumes what he wishes to prove by seeking a writ that requires a person as "beneficiary of relief" before it is established that "Tommy" is a person.
Without a prior determination of personhood for "Tommy," the writ will always be denied because "Tommy" has no standing to sue anyone for anything.
The N.Y. Civil Practice Rules govern all legal proceedings in this state, but public law (where the state is usually a party imposing penalties on individuals) is distinct from private (usually civil litigation over money and other remedies where the state may be a party).
This lawsuit may have been written and filed by "Tommy" because it does not seem to be the work of any lawyer. Is "Tommy" from New Jersey? ("Ape and Essence.")
In rejecting a similar law suit in a California Federal District Court, a weary judge made the point also articulated in New York's courtrooms:
"The only reasonable interpretation of the 13th Amendment's plain language is that it applies to persons and not to non-persons, such as Orcas." (p. 33.)
Much the same applies to the hallowed writ of habeas corpus. The law confers a unique set of protections upon persons because of the singular ONTOLOGICAL STATUS of persons, human beings, the basis for which status in the modern era is derived from the works of Immanuel Kant. The most powerful recent defense of this special status is found in the Nuremberg Proceedings against the Nazis responsible for the Holocaust. The Nazis claimed that Jews were subhumans, "rodents," whose "extermination" was a service to humanity.
Justice Robert Jackson -- one of those annoyingly legalistic and philosophical American jurists -- rejected this argument, knowingly encouraging litigation by African-Americans and women in subsequent decades in pursuit of their rights in American courtrooms, as equal persons, based on their shared humanity with, say, Justice Jackson.
The experience of Hitler and the Holocaust was the motivation for international human rights laws that we have steadily dismantled after 9/11. We will come to regret this destruction of the system of international law and Mr. Bush's now infamous "torture policy." ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.")
To bring this tongue-in-cheek litigation on behalf of "Tommy" insults the victims of the Nazi horror and Dr. King along with many persons who gave their lives in the struggle for human freedom and equality that today is crucially focused on the plight of women in the world.
Many young women, my daughter's age, in other countries and in America are denied all opportunity to develop their minds equally with young men, poverty afflicts women and girls much more than men, nutrition is more of a problem for women, access to health care and procreative choice is being taken from women without the resources to fight costly legal battles, women are sexually assaulted and raped -- as I have been raped -- more often and brutally than men, seemingly to the indifference of establishments that minimize the emotional and physical cost of this horrible crime upon victims.
Before we spend any more time worrying about "Tommy," let us focus on these burning issues being ignored by many of our politicians. A final word on the meaning of persons in our civilization should be sufficient to discourage future lawsuits like this unfortunate action by making it clear why "Tommy" will never make it:
" ... it has become commonplace to think of humans as simply beasts or zombies. Specifically human aspects -- such as the importance of history, culture and agency -- are often written out of the story. Contemporary theories of humanness tend to regard a human being less as a subject capable of acting upon the world, than as an object through whom nature acts. It is this vision of humans as objects that is most troubling. Not only does it celebrate a sense of fatalism about human prospects, but history also reveals that once you view human beings as objects, then the normal restraints of humanity become loosened."
This is the crucial point:
" ... 'There can be no philosophy,' Jacob Bronowski once suggested, 'nor even a decent science without humanity.' Bronowski was a scientist, educator and broadcaster, who, in 1972, wrote and presented a glorious BBC television series, The Ascent of Man. The series was an exploration of the development of science, and more broadly of humanity's attempts to understand and control nature, from the Stone Age to the Space Age. For Bronowski, 'Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he [or she] does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of marvellous plasticity of mind.' The Ascent of Man was the story of man's [and woman's] freedom, of his gradual emancipation from nature, an expression of the way that man's imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness, make it possible for him not to accept the environment, but to change it." (Kenan Malik, p. 25, emphasis added. Mr. Malik is a neurobiologist and research psychologist.)
