The analogy works fine. A chimp is like a baby in the sense that neither can participate in society. Babies, however, are still treated as having rights. The analogy had nothing to do with who can crush skulls.
Maybe I made too far of a jump. I'm just here to discuss the issue and don't really know what I think, so please humor me.
What I was saying was that babies rarely have to be held accountable for any serious action - absent heavy machinery or dangerous materials, a baby can do very limited damage. A naked chimp who's a bit moody, though, can easily cause someone serious harm.
If we are not going to hold that chimp responsible for what they did just as we would with a person (because punishment would also be inhumane or nonproductive), then chimps don't match up perfectly with babies in terms of the need for legal rights and representation.
> What I was saying was that babies rarely have to be held accountable for any serious action - absent heavy machinery or dangerous materials, a baby can do very limited damage. A naked chimp who's a bit moody, though, can easily cause someone serious harm.
This is also true about, say, a severely autistic adult, who we still deem to be worthy of a wide variety of rights.
No worries, I typically comment the same way and I understand if not everything that is typed is a deeply held rigid opinion.
I agree that it would likely not be a good idea for chimps to live in human society, but I think a true rational analysis without invoking divine right would find that if we consider human individuals as possessing a basic right to life, we would find the same for chimps, dolphins, and probably many other animals (perhaps all the way to insects and bacteria).
The idea that they all need to live in our society to be treated fairly by the legal system is one that I think needs reexamining. Dolphins, for example, could simply never live in human society because they live underwater and humans do not. But we could find that a human who abuses a dolphin is depriving the dolphin of some legal right to live a non-abused life (I don't know what the legal term here is).
I think this is new legal territory, but I have a feeling that environmental protection lawyers will soon try to show that animals have inalienable rights just like humans. (I say it's new, but I also know that people have been working on this for a long time.)
So chimps and babies interface with society in different ways, but I feel like they both have a right to life. I mean, religious conservatives say that a fertilized egg has all the same rights as a living human - I see no reason why dolphins and non-human apes should be treated any differently. I know there is a legal history of treating animals like inanimate objects, but that doesn't seem to follow the spirit of our laws protecting the sovereignty of intelligent individuals. I see that changing somehow in the future.
A chimp is able to rip a person apart or crush their head in much more easily than a baby, so I don't think the original analogy works.