Transcription
[Applause] [Music]
In the Planet of the Apes reboot movies, we see a continuation of the original themes of the original film. Domination of one culture over another is wrong. The movies present the case that enslavement or mistreatment of other people due to a perceived primitive nature is without intellectual merit and is morally unconscionable.
The original film is an allegory not for how humans treat non-human animals, but for how humans treat other humans. But if we abandon the intentional allegory and see the films more at face value, we uncover some interesting questions. So let's talk about the tongue-twistery word speciesism, a term coined by writer Richard Ryder, which means prejudice against a being due to its membership in a species.
In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Dreyfus is a speciesist. Even after learning that the apes are intelligent, can negotiate with the humans, and that their leader means no harm, Dreyfus recommends that his people kill the entire population of apes for greater access to a nearby dam. He gives his friend only a few days to come up with a peaceful solution. That's because Dreyfus values any human life over the entire population of apes, solidifying his speciesism.
Now, in the real world, most humans are speciesist. We generally value human life over non-human life. But is that only because of our own membership in the human species, which is not itself a particularly intellectual answer? Or because there is enough evidence to suggest animals, even apes who display many of our characteristics, have not achieved our standard of personhood?
When Will discovers Caesar is as intelligent as a human, he decides to care for the ape indefinitely. We, the audience, are meant to agree with both his decision and Caesar's rights as a person. When he is treated as an animal and imprisoned in the zoo, we are meant to sympathize with him. When Caesar is concerned that he is a pet to Will, we sympathize there as well. When the zookeeper reminds Will that Caesar is not a person, we are meant to disagree with him. But why? Well, it just feels wrong, right? Our speciesism is cast aside because Caesar feels like more than an animal.
But that creates questions. How did Caesar, to the audience, achieve personhood even though he is not a human? And if Caesar existed in the real world, would we still label him a person? Where do we draw the line? Where is the threshold between a being we would consider an animal and a being we would consider having personhood and therefore greater rights?
Well, many would point to the key differences between humans and apes, in spite of our otherwise similar characteristics and common DNA. That being our greater intelligence and our ability to speak. Will treats Caesar differently than other apes after learning of his intelligence, but he is comfortable with normal apes being the subjects of dangerous experiments. The existence of a vastly more intelligent ape does not change the status of normal apes for Will. Caesar is a person to Will. The other apes are not. But is that enough? Why does intelligence create greater moral consideration? They do not seem related.
Consider the case of the Colonel from War for the Planet of the Apes. He discovers that the virus that wiped out most of humanity has mutated. For those previously immune to the effects of the virus, a new danger has emerged. The virus can now impede greater cognitive functions in humans, most notably the ability to speak or think as well as normally. The Colonel, now infected, insists that Caesar put him out of his misery. Now that the Colonel can't communicate due to what the virus did to him, do we now consider him no longer a person?
The question has two uncomfortable answers. If the answer is yes, and we still do consider him a person, but not a real-world ape with a similar lack of communication skills and cognitive abilities, it is merely speciesist and without a philosophically sound reason. Now, if the answer is no, and we don't consider him a person anymore, then this eliminates treating real-world humans with cognitive disabilities as people either. Any answer is terrifying and morally outrageous.
To the Colonel, his definition of personhood is clear: intelligence. It is the essential component to humanity, and without it, we are not people to him. However, the film seems to disagree with this. For one, Caesar refuses to kill him for this alone. For another, Nova, the young girl, is also infected with the virus. Because of this, she is mute and does not have the functions she once did. We do not, however, see her as less than human, less of a person, because of it.
One way that we measure intelligence is by our capacity for language. When Caesar first shouts "No!", the zookeepers regard him differently. The fact that some real-world apes can use sign language is proof of some level of intelligence greater than most other animals, and humanity's more complex capacity for language is evidence of our greatest intelligence on our planet. But is signing the way humans do enough to prove that apes are people, or is there something they lack?
How else can we determine if apes are people? It may be in the way that only humans seem to be able to interact with one another. Deception, lying, requires a sophistication of cognitive abilities that suggests higher functions, not intelligence in the way that the apes in the laboratory are given mental tests to see how far along their development is. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence that goes beyond the basic ability to learn and retain information.
In order to properly deceive, one must be working on what 20th-century philosopher Daniel Dennett called a second-order intentional system. He said intentional systems theory is, in the first place, an analysis of the meanings of such everyday mentalistic terms as believe, desire, expect, decide, and intend. The terms of folk psychology that we use to interpret, explain, and predict the behavior of other human beings, animals, and some artifacts, such as robots and computers, and indeed ourselves. That is a bit of a mouthful, but as it relates to Planet of the Apes, it means that the newly enhanced apes at the zoo must be capable of beliefs, desires, and other intentions, and must be capable of having beliefs and desires about beliefs and desires, specifically to want someone to have a false belief.
In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Koba secretly sets fire to the apes' home. He then shoots Caesar and frames the humans for Caesar's apparent death as a false flag to wage war on humanity. Caesar actually survives, and Koba's deception is revealed. According to Dennett, Koba is displaying an intentional system on a level necessary to qualify as a person.
Now, this may seem rather inflammatory to humanity. The idea that humans are people because we lie, it's a bit provocative, maybe even insulting. But many psychologists have proposed that deception is how we became human to begin with. The evolutionary advantage of being able to deceive other members of one's social group is what led to the brain size and intelligence that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Those who had greater ability to deceive and detect deception survived and passed on their genes.
People who misunderstand evolution sometimes question loudly, "If evolution is real, why are there still apes?" But that is not how that worked. Humans did not evolve from chimpanzees like Caesar. Instead, humans and apes have a common ancestor. The evolutionary divergence occurred between 5 million and 7 million years ago, although some say it's a broader approximation of that. But if deception is what makes us people, and humans and apes diverged millions of years ago, wouldn't that be enough to declare apes not people?
Well, not quite. Outside of the fictional realm of Planet of the Apes, there is evidence of deception among apes who have learned sign language. Take, for example, the famous Koko the gorilla. After Koko ripped a large steel sink from the wall and her keepers asked her about it, she claimed that her pet cat did it. She blamed it on someone else. She lied. Many other animals display varying degrees of deception as well. Animals play dead, for example. Whether this is functional deception, meaning association of an action with another action, or intentional deception with respect to beliefs about truths and falsehoods, is still open for debate. Although there are a lot of laboratory experiments that say that it is the former and not the latter.
Indeed, all of this deception may not be enough to convince some philosophers of the personhood of non-human animals. They perhaps think that anything that is not human, even the enhanced apes in the zoo of the film, could not be classified as people, and that they are only living machines programmed by God or evolution. The problem with this blanket assertion is that that could be applied to humans as well. The assertion is meant to differentiate between humans and non-human animals, but if it can just as easily be applicable to humans, it erases the claim altogether due to its lack of differentiation.
Yet, even if laboratory tests conclude that apes can only withhold information but not truly deceive, and again, there is a lot of evidence of that, is that enough to disqualify them from being people, from beings that think, have desires, feelings, etc.? The Alpha Omega military cult in the film shouts and barks like animals, blurring the line between us and them. Maybe our personhood is something more than speaking and deception. The soldiers have been stripped of their humanity, not by the virus, but by the Colonel, who has turned them into unsympathetic monsters. The virus does not take that away.
When the Colonel killed his son after the child was infected, apparently the boy still showed love for his father. Maybe that's the real humanity, the real personhood, even if it's rather difficult to measure. If so, at least in this case, the apes have achieved it.
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