Animals can be deserving of Personhood

Let me touch upon on our clash of definitions so that voters are more aware of my decisions. For one thing, this is a philosophical debate (as you can see by the category). When we're talking about the rights of any individual (women and LGBT members for instance) it is always a question of philosophy as we are essentially asking ourselves who do Lockean principles apply to? This is the first reason I opted for the philosophical definition of "person" over the others. My second reason has to do with corporate personhood. In the United States, the Supreme Court, in two rulings (Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) decided that corporations had a wider variety of rights than were initially granted, which has since evolved into corporations being declared "persons" in the United States. Now, if the definition of a person is simply a human being, how can we include corporations in it? We use the philosophical one. And finally, my last reason for doing so is common sense. How can I debate that animals are human beings? It's not possible. Philosophers don't consider the words human and person to be synonymous. Think about it this way- a square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not a square. A human is a person but a person is not a human. To give more support to this, consider the question of slavery. It was never a question of human being v. property but the question of person v. property. Were they people? Or were they property? Also to, as the saying goes, put a stake in the matter, if my opponent wishes to insist that the definition of a person is simply a synonym for human-being, than this debate cannot go further. I'd like to clarify that this is not an attack on my opponent, but just a statement that I do not wish to waste either of our times debating terminology when a topic of this matter has the potential to go deep in philosophy (a subject I assume we both have a love for). Onto the official debate then. When we take the philosophical-definition of a person, we come to a rift of two categories; consciousness and rationality. Let's take the first category; consciousness (note the difference between consciousness and conscience). To quote the philosopher Charles Taylor in his book 'The Concept of a Person' "a person is a being with consciouesness, where consciousness is seen as a power to frame representations of things. " To give the official definition (from Merriam-Webster of course). "The quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself" Now of course, the dictionary definition isn't enough when we take into account the vast debate that has been going on in defining the consciousness, from Descartes to Dawkins. The philosopher Ned Block simplifies this debate by creating two different categories of a consciousness. The first, which he dubs the Phenomenal (or P) Consciousness essentially revolves around the idea of experiencing qualia which in turn are our experiences/perceptions of the activities in the world around us. Philosopher Colin Allen sees this as another way of stating sentience, an idea which I agree with (my opponent is free to argue this). Keeping on this train of thought, sentience opens up new doors in the world of animal rights. There is a wide range of evidence to support this claim, most prominently the pain argument (I do not feel the need to find evidence for this as it seems to be common sense). To summarize my thoughts on this, I will quote Voltaire:"What! that bird which makes its nest in a semi-circle when it is attaching it to a wall, which builds it in a quarter circle when it is in an angle, and in a circle upon a tree; that bird acts always in the same way? That hunting-dog which you have disciplined for three months, does it not know more at the end of this time than it knew before your lessons? Does the canary to which you teach a tune repeat it at once? do you not spend a considerable time in teaching it? have you not seen that it has made a mistake and that it corrects itself? "Sentience or P-consciousness is, as I just stated, one part of Block's categorization of the consciousness as a whole. The second part is what he calls the Access (A) Consciousness. I do not feel the need to go into this as it is, in simplest terms, basically the ability to "access" the information gathered from qualia. Think of it as learning about addition and bringing that information about. However, we're not done with consciousness as there is one more aspect to be talked about (which I believe my opponent will find the most ground in making his argument), and that is the self-consciousness. You may know this better as self-awareness. "I think therefore I am". This was Descartes's answer to the Brain-in-a-Vat problem, but I believe it works as a solution for this issue of whether or not animals are self-aware. If an animal can be aware of its environment (as is the case with sentience), then why can't it be aware of itself in this world? Unfortunately there is the problem of "Other Minds". Essentially it is this (and note that it does apply to both humans and non-humans); "I am aware that I am aware, but how do I know that you are aware? " It really is the truth because no one can be 100% that someone else is self-aware (hence where mind-reading comes into play in fiction). With other humans, however, we make the assumption that they are self-aware b/c they are like us and can tell us. With non-human animals, we have the language barrier amongst other barriers that prevent us from fully knowing. Luckily, however, science has provided us with a decent way of proving self-awareness in some species. It's called the mirror test. Basically you put a test spot on an animal (can be a dye, chalk, or sticker) that can only be seen through a mirror and you have that animal look in the mirror. If it notices the spot and does something about it, then the animal is self-aware. Wikipedia provides a sourced list of animals that have passed the test, so I'll just copy and paste if it's all the same to my opponent: All great apes: Bottlenose dolphins Orcas Elephants European Magpies The test does have some constrictions however, namely that it relies heavily on the activeness of the occipital lobe. The problem is not every animal's occipital lobe is the same development-wise. Take dogs for instance, who's brains are dominated by an olfactory cortex (smell). Improvements are coming and science may very well give us a better test, but for now this will have to do as sufficient "solid-evidence". I'm going to end this topic on yet another Voltaire quote:"Barbarians seize this dog, which in friendship surpasses man so prodigiously; they nail it on a table, and they dissect it alive in order to show the mesenteric veins. You discover in it all the same organs of feeling that are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel? has it nerves in order to be impassible? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature. "I've bolded that last sentence b/c it really does speak to what a lot of animal rights activitists feel is a hypocrisy within humanity that has been used as a justification for specieism. We are all made up of the same materials (organs, blood, veins, muscles, nerves, etc. .. ) yet there is still a, what you may call, crusade to find a distinction between humans and animals. The final stake in the argument. The University of Cambridge had a conference last year on consciousness that involved top scientists in all fields related to the subject. They made the declaration that animals have a consciousness. It goes into the biology of it all as well, but it is evidence. . http://fcmconference.org...=Sources=http://history.hanover.edu...http://plato.stanford.edu...