Monkeys should be considered persons in the eyes of the law

1) Generally speaking, a right is a moral or legal claim (or potential claim) that one party may exercise against either another person, group, community, or " in very, very extreme cases " all of humankind. 2) Depending on the context of a situation, the content of a right can change drastically; therefore, in order to fully comprehend what rights, both specifically and generally, entail, we must be capable of discerning who holds the right, who has impinged upon that right, and why it is actually a right. 3) In other words, there are certain cognitive processes necessary for one to able to comprehend (and subsequently defend) one"s rights, regardless of the circumstance or the facts surround it. 4) To this end, it is safe to say that rights can only be enacted and intelligibly defended by those capable of these cognitive processes " essentially, beings that are capable of actually making moral claims against one another. 5) And the reality of this statement is that the only beings in existence that are capable of making such moral claims are, indeed, human beings. 6) Therefore, whatever else rights may be, it stands to reason that they are necessarily human; because human beings are, in actuality, the sole proprietors of the ability to make moral claims, which makes them, in turn, the sole proprietors of rights as a whole. 7) In addition, human beings are morally autonomous " that is, they have a significant amount of moral self-government, and are capable of making decisions of their own accord " as well as self-legislative, and are thus capable of exercising and responding to moral claims. 8) The same cannot be said for animals, however; in that they lack the capacity for free moral judgment that enables humans to be morally self-governing, as well as the ability to propose and respond to general moral claims. 9) Those that would hold rights are obligated to both have the capacity to comprehend the rules set before them, say, in society, which governs both themselves and their society as a whole; as well as the capacity to recognize and understand when there may possibly be a conflict between what is "morally just "and what would, for all intents and purposes, be in their best interest. 10) Arguably, this capability is an innate trait in human beings, but it is simply not so for animals " or any other animate creature that is not a human being, for example. 11) We give a certain reverence and respect to other animate beings in nature, of course, but we cannot infer that just because something is animate, is living, that it has a "right" to its life " because the ownership of rights and overall moral status is something that is not maintained by the vast majority of animate beings. 12) Overall, humans are, as I"ve stated before, self-legislative; they are also members of communities governed by moral rules, and possess rights. 13) Animals, on the other hand, are not self-legislative, and they do not (and cannot possibly) belong to communities governed by moral rules. 14) Therefore, they cannot possess rights the way that human beings do. 15) To this end, in conducting research on monkeys, for example, we do not violate their rights, simply because they have none to violate. 16) The assertion that we would be violating a monkey"s "rights", or it"s "right to life", in this example, because we are experimenting upon it, would be to abuse the word (or phrase) altogether. 17) In our dealings with animals, we may find that there are obligations that arise, but that do not arise because the animal is "entitled" to some sort of treatment simply because it is alive, or because of a "right" invoked. 18) These obligations, rather, may arise from such things as internal commitments, differences of status, special relationships, or even particular acts of kindness or circumstances " but none of these things are tied specifically to the rights of the animal in question, nor do they entail the moral argument for "rights" in the least. 19) Some may hold that there is a general obligation to do no gratuitous harm to living creatures, while others may hold that there is a general obligation to do good to living creatures when such a thing is reasonably within one"s power, or when someone is capable of doing so. 20) This is undisputed -- there is no excuse for treating an animal in any other way than humanely in our day-to-day interactions. As fellow sentient creatures, we owe them this much. 21) However, to treat animals humanely is not synonymous with treating them as humans; thus, it is not synonymous with treating them as holders of rights. 22) Some might raise the objection that if having rights requires being capable of making moral claims, and grasping and understanding moral laws, then humans that plainly lack those capacities -- ie., the brain-damaged, comatose, or senile -- must also be without rights. 23) But this objection fails, in that it treats an essential feature of humanity as though it were merely a screen for sorting humans, which is mistaken. 24) People that lack the capacity to understand the aforementioned laws are not ejected from the moral community as a whole because they lack the capacity; because the features that distinguish animals from humans is not akin to a test to be administered to individuals one by one. 25) Going back to the ability to distinguish what is morally correct and what is in one"s best interests, humans can act immorally often enough, but only they can discern whether or not this is a "good" or "bad" act; in the case of, say, monkeys, it is simply not so. 26) To this end, it can be said that only humans are capable of committing crimes -- because a crime requires one to recognize that an act one commits is wrong alongside the guilty act. This is known as mens rea. 27) Being that humans are able to distinguish between morally acceptable and unacceptable acts, especially in regards to those acts that we commit of our own volition, courts of law are able to establish mens rea in criminal cases -- such as murders and rapes. 28) But the same cannot be said for animals; they can not and do not differentiate between morally acceptable and unacceptable acts, and have no established set of moral principles within their community. 29) Moral principles, among laws and statues, are the basis of the law. 30) One cannot be recognized by the law if they do not have the capability to recognize and comprehend the principles established by the law, because, going back to the example of criminal cases, one cannot establish mens rea if the guilty party has no capability to assess what is "right" or "wrong" -- therefore making them completely devoid of a guilty conscience. 31) Animals, such as monkeys, cannot establish nor assess what is morally "right" or "wrong". 32) Therefore, animals, such as monkeys, should not be considered persons in the eyes of the law.