A bit of a followup to my last post: sometimes, nonhumans are granted habeas corpus:

Sandra will, unless there’s a successful appeal, be moved from the zoo to a sanctuary.

In practice, this might not make all that much difference.  She’ll still be confined in a sanctuary; it would be utterly indefensible just to turf her out onto the streets, and she wouldn’t last long.  And in some cases, it’s quite possible that a well-run zoo is the best possible place in which to look after her or others like her.  Zoo, sanctuary: tomayto, tomahto.  Meh.

What matters primarily is that a point of principle is established, and secondarily that there would be some guidance about the kind of facilities that would be minimally decent.  It’s likely to be wholly acceptable, morally and legally, to keep great apes in some form of captivity if it’s in their interests, in rather the same way that we might provide a human child or an adult with an intellectual disability with sheltered or supervised accommodation, and might even limit their time away from it.  (The family home is a kind of sheltered and supervised accommodation!)  If a creature – human or orang or chimp or whatever else – can’t deal with the world around them, that seems to be morally required.  Let’s call this “soft captivity”, as opposed to the “hard” captivity of some zoos, prisons, laboratories, and so on.  The point is that, rather as we wouldn’t deny that a child or adult disabled human is a person and thus protected by the law, it does seem reasonable to extend that protection to members of other species.

I wonder how much further we could push it: it’s one thing to have a great ape in soft captivity for its own protection; and it’s one thing to say that if a great ape is in captivity, it ought to be soft captivity.  But could we make a similar claim about keeping a member of a species in soft captivity for the sake of protecting the species?

Orangs are under threat.  Now, a threat to the species is almost always a threat to the members of the species, too – and so we would almost always be unable to distinguish acting to protect individual orangs and the species as a whole.  But this needn’t be the case.  Imagine that there are two small colonies of the animal left; a genetic bottleneck means that neither is viable on its own, but, if they were combined, the species may be rescued and flourish in the future.  Furthermore, each colony is in a confined area that cannot support a bigger population.  There is no direct threat to either colony, though.  It so happens that a busy road separates the colonies, which means that they are to all intents and purposes isolated.

Would it be permissible to swing into action to take all these orangs into a sufficiently big sanctuary, and maybe to keep them there for the sake of increasing the population?  It wouldn’t obviously be in the interests of any particular living orang; but it could be in the interests of the species.  Even if the captivity is soft, it is still captivity.  Would it be justified?

Part of me thinks that it might be; but this does rely on thinking that the species qua species has a moral value and interest, aside from the value and interest of its members.  And that does seem like a bit of a stretch – especially if (as seems plausible) individual orangs have no concept of species with which they can identify.

Admittedly, this isn’t a medical ethics post in the strict sense – but it’s a nice story, so ner.