ok, the article doesn't explicitly say they should have human rights but that is exactly what they mean.
Though if you grant the same rights as humans they should also be subject to the same restrictions. So the rape and murder dolphins especially indulge in would need to be punished.

There is a fundamental difference between granting (or recognising for those who prefer) a dolphin's right to life and extending it protection from hunting and fishing. The latter is a negative limitation on the fisherman's rights, the former a positive affirmation of the dolphin's. So there is something more at stake than mere semantics, because eventually in any discussion of ethics, you have to arrive at the question of why something is right or wrong. Recognition of a right is valuable for its universality - protection that is derived from a simple prohibition is contingent.

I am not familiar with the authors of this actual declaration, but they seem to follow a fairly standard line of argument. Critically, it does involve some shady semantics (IMO) to do with the concept of personhood. It's hard to comment much beyond that based on the story as represented by the BBC or The Independent, but I get the impression that all the actual philosophy on display is old news, stuff that Regan and Singer covered decades ago, what appears to be new is the science. Certainly if this book is what's driving this whole story, then it's not very promising http://www.indefenseofdolphins.com/book/toc.html
Two essential things seem to be missing, the first, and by far the more important is an actual basis for not preferring the unimportant rights of a human (leisure) over the essential rights of a dolphin (freedom). That might sound facetious, but if he's not taken that question on, it's not worth giving him airtime. The other is that his empirical arguments don't include a lot of dolphin ethics. High level problem solving is all very well for his personhood argument, but what would really have helped him out would be if he could prove that dolphins find theft outrageous and have a visible sense of fairness, because that sort of thing makes them moral agents.

So I think I'd rather go around these guys and point to an original and gifted thinker on the subject instead, Mary Midgley. She argued (in Animals And Why They Matter iirc) that rights always apply to a group, and those groups always start small. In Athens - that legendary democracy - maybe 20% of the population actually had political rights, the remainder were too young, too female, or too enslaved to have any. The way that those of us inside the rights group come to extend rights to those outside is what really matters though. We start by seeing the similarities between us and them as well as whatever differences have prevented us from granting rights before, and we re-evaluate relative importance of each. Sure, in some cases we re-evaluate because we are prompted by protests, but ultimately those with the rights do have to be persuaded as a rule. Over time, what was seen as an adequate excuse not to include a group within the privileged circle (race, religion, gender, wealth, species) simply stops being so.

So although this particular attempt to demand rights for dolphins, and the PETA SeaWorld thing too, both look doomed; in the long run, history is on their side and future generations will probably consider this conversation evidence of their grandparents barbarism.

Possibly, but by a dolphin court and under dolphin laws... which I imagine they're already good at.

That's not true. You have a multitude of human rights that are simply not appropriate to dolphins, like voting for instance. They appear to do their politics in an entirely different way, and it's hard to get them to fill out the paperwork.
The rights requested for dolphins are those the authors feel appropriate to them, which is a subset of human rights: no imprisonment, no killing, no slavery. No jurisdiction or code of law is implied in those rights.

The problem with that surely is that it's arbitrary - what 'rights' are included in the subset that is apportioned to dolphins is simply the view of one individual or a small group. Without some level of consensus in if not the majority then at least some fairly large portion of the population, you're on a hiding to nothing.


Jon

Probably about the same rights given to aboriginal people, namely we destroy their natural environment and make them live in little encampments with no resources.

And then we'll complain that they don't integrate with the alien society...

This idea was given a look on the Daily Show recently. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPkuuu5-pfU

That arbitrary quality is not a weakness of this particular proposal, it's just a fact of how rights are defined and managed in all cases. No matter what the framers of various national constitutions would like you to believe, there is no objective correct set of rights for any entity, humans and dolphins included equally. They are a convention which we adopt because it is nice rather than true.

Nevertheless, once a convention is adopted and recognition is more or less universal, those who recognise it are effectively bound by its internal logic. We are expected in effect to overlook the absence of logical force because we have adopted the policy already in spite of that same failing. So in order for us to validly hold the rights that we like so much, we are required to recognise those same rights for others. There are always barriers that justify excluding outsiders from the same consideration as insiders, but we have not got to look very far for evidence of their permeability. So it is fallacious to assume in advance that we can draw a specific line. Some may find the very notion of extending rights to animals on the same basis as to other human groups to be quite absurd, but this position is based on lack of imagination rather than solid reasoning.

But beyond that point, we haven't really got any basis to decide whether we collectively or individually support this new(ish) proposal, because nobody is committing themselves to any actual position on the internal logic of rights. Opinions on why dolphins shouldn't have rights are only relevant if they don't conflict with your opinion of why you should have them. Not to mention which rights you apply to babies in general, offspring in particular, pets, coma victims and many others. All of which have the capability to undermine arguments you might use to prevent rights extending beyond the species boundary.

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