If we conceive of plants as persons, and I understand that there are good arguments against this position, we have to eventually consider what such a proposition means with regard to plant agency and, especially, plant liability. Such a concern stems from my conception of personhood as being defined by six parameters: agency, sentience, perception, consciousness, communicability and contractibility. To briefly summarize: agency is the capacity to do things, sentience is the capacity to sense things, perception is the capacity to cognitively process things, consciousness is the capacity to gather these cognitions into a synthesized awareness, communicability is the capacity to communicate with other things, and contractibility is the capacity to enter into agreements with other things. From my perspective, any one of these abilities is sufficient cause to designate personhood in an entity. It is a pretty broad view of personhood, I understand, but I feel that by using science and logic one can make a strong argument that plants are persons.
Where my argument gets even more difficult is when I start to consider liability in plants. From one perspective, it is quite easy get there as we do it all the time by creating what is considered to be a 'legal fiction'. If I park my car on a hill and another car comes along and hits it in such a way as to cause it to roll down a hill and smash into another car, I may be found to be not guilty in the event, in a legal sense, but I could very well be held liable, with regards to my auto insurance. Things happen, they are not my fault, but I still have to make amends somehow. In a literal sense I did not cause any of these things to happen, unless one considers my parking of the car to have conditioned, facilitated, allowed or made possible the string of events, but as a result of a system of laws and policies, and the legal fictions that are immanent to them, I bear some liability for them.
If we start to enfold nonhumans into this arrangement by enrolling them in our social and legal fictions, to what extent and in what manner can we assign liability to them? Medieval jurists had no trouble convicting animals of crimes, such as when a goat wandered into a bean patch and devoured a crop. Today, such a thing would be considered impossible because the legal fiction to which we adhere is that it is not the goat who is liable for its actions but the owner of the goat. In a modern court, one could not sue the goat but one could certainly sue the owner for such an act, on the grounds that he or she is liable for not restraining the goat properly and allowing it to wander onto another person's property. But it really was not the owner who ate the beans. It was the goat.
What would a system of laws (within the ambit of a legal system) or policies (within the realm of insurance) that could accommodate plant liability look like? Could a tree carry insurance that would protect it in the case of an accident that it caused? I don't see why not. Such a policy could depend upon the idea that all agency and all liability devolved to the tree without involving the agencies of other persons or property, a scenario which raises the question of recognizing personhood for land, conceived as a unitary entity, which is another fiction in itself. One need only pay attention to the dispute in North Dakota over the installation of an oil pipeline to see a living example of land and its components, in this case water in particular, as an entity that deserves respect by virtue of its sacred nature, a sacrality that is alien to western thought but essential to the world views of Native American cultures and the societies that embrace them. At the risk of dissolving into a kind of naive philosophical conjecture, the quandary leads me to consider the fiction of truth and, more optimistically, the truth of fiction.
What a strangely animated world such a shift would portend for the modern industrial world. It would mean an entry into a system of relations already enjoyed by many people, a group that is great in wisdom but sadly small in number, and even worse, weak in power. One can hope that the power - and beauty - of their ideas eventually wins out.
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