The present reflection draws upon a tradition of energetic, world-facing critical legal scholarship to interrogate the
anthropos
assumed by the terminology of ‘anthropocentrism’ and of the ...‘Anthropocene’. The article concludes that any ethically responsible future engagement with ‘anthropocentrism’ and/or with the ‘Anthropocene’ must explicitly engage with the oppressive hierarchical structure of the
anthropos
itself—and should directly address its apotheosis in the corporate juridical subject that dominates the entire globalised order of the Anthropocene age.
Regulating artificial intelligence (AI) has become necessary in light of its deployment in high-risk scenarios. This paper explores the proposal to extend legal personhood to AI and robots, which had ...not yet been examined through the lens of the general public. We present two studies (
N
= 3,559) to obtain people’s views of electronic legal personhood vis-à-vis existing liability models. Our study reveals people’s desire to punish automated agents even though these entities are not recognized any mental state. Furthermore, people did not believe automated agents’ punishment would fulfill deterrence nor retribution and were unwilling to grant them legal punishment preconditions, namely physical independence and assets. Collectively, these findings suggest a conflict between the desire to punish automated agents and its perceived impracticability. We conclude by discussing how future design and legal decisions may influence how the public reacts to automated agents’ wrongdoings.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, person rights for nature have been added to the suite of resolution mechanisms for Treaty of Waitangi claims. New laws for two national parks personify landscapes and Maori ...relations with them to encourage greater appreciation and care, and similar arrangements will follow for other parks. However, it is uncertain whether recognizing Indigenous rights by tying them to the rights of nature will be enforceable and effective. In Te Urewera, Treaty claims emerged more from land loss than disrespect for biocultural values, but the granting of person rights was intended to avoid return of ancestral land to the local tribe, Ngai Tuhoe. Personhood will realize only some of Tuhoe’s interests because retention of preservationist conservation means that few will ever live or work on their homelands. Rather than resolving the false inclusion, repressive authenticity and delimited recognition observed in overseas processes for claims settlement, granting personhood to nature for the purported benefit of Maori is an act of mis/recognition. Disingenuously, it conflates Indigenous with environmental, development with preservation and human with natural values.
One of the most hotly debated issues in contemporary Muslim ethics is the status of women in Islamic law. Whereas Muslim conservatives argue that gender-differentiated legal rulings reflect ...complementary gender roles, Muslim feminists argue that Islamic law has subordinated women and is thus in need of reform. The shared assumption on both sides, however, is that gender fundamentally shapes an individual’s legal status. Beyond the Binary explores an expansive cross section of topics in ninth- to twelfth-century Hanafi legal thought, ranging from sexual crimes to consent to marriage, to show that early Muslim jurists imagined a world built not on a binary distinction between male and female but on multiple intersecting hierarchies of gender, age, enslavement, lineage, class, and other social roles. Saadia Yacoob offers a restorative reading of Islamic law, arguing that its intersectional and relational understanding of legal personhood offers a productive space for Muslim feminists to move beyond critique and instead think with and through the Islamic legal tradition.
This paper considers the hotly debated issue of whether one should grant moral and legal personhood to intelligent robots once they have achieved a certain standard of sophistication based on such ...criteria as rationality, autonomy, and social relations. The starting point for the analysis is the European Parliament’s resolution on Civil Law Rules on Robotics (2017) and its recommendation that robots be granted legal status and electronic personhood. The resolution is discussed against the background of the so-called Robotics Open Letter, which is critical of the Civil Law Rules on Robotics (and particularly of §59 f.). The paper reviews issues related to the moral and legal status of intelligent robots and the notion of legal personhood, including an analysis of the relation between moral and legal personhood in general and with respect to robots in particular. It examines two analogies, to corporations (which are treated as legal persons) and animals, that have been proposed to elucidate the moral and legal status of robots. The paper concludes that one should not ascribe moral and legal personhood to currently existing robots, given their technological limitations, but that one should do so once they have achieved a certain level at which they would become comparable to human beings.
This paper reflects on the problem of endowing Artificial Intelligence (AI) with legal subjectivity, especially with regard to civil law. It is necessary to reject the myth that the criteria of legal ...subjectivity are sentience and reason. Arguing that AI may have potential legal subjectivity based on an analogy to animals or juristic persons suggests the existence of a single hierarchy or sequence of entities, organized according to their degree of similarity to human beings; also, that the place of an entity in this hierarchy determines the scope of subjectivity attributed to it. Rather, it is participation or presence in social life, whatever the role, that is the true criterion of subjectivity. In addition, it is clear that even if AI is not currently a significant participant in social life, it will be in the nearest future. Despite the potential dangers associated with endowing AI with some kind of subjectivity, such a course is inescapable, and should be considered sooner rather than later.
In this article, I focus on how the issue of considering animals as legal persons has been argued in court by the Nonhuman Rights Project led by Steven Wise in the United States and how this project ...was recently adopted and reinterpreted by an animal rights organisation in India in preparation for their own court battle. In turn, Indian cases raising the question of the legal personhood of animals and rivers have been used by Wise as examples to argue his case in court. The comparison will raise the question of how legal ideas and strategies regarding so-called ‘rights of nature’ travel around the world, giving rise to reciprocal appropriations and possible idealisations.
Who belongs to communities of justice in the Anthropocene? While Western and non-Western traditions alike have typically afforded legal recognition primarily to humans and secondarily to some ...non-human entities under limited conditions, arrival of the Anthropocene suggests a new approach is needed in order to address the range and origins of injustices occurring within the Earth system. Beginning with a discussion of Earth system law and how its expansive scope accommodates non-traditional legal subjects, the essay proceeds with an overview of the rights of nature movement. I then present a comparative analysis of rights of nature cases adjudicated in Ecuador, Colombia, and India. From the foregoing evidence I argue that both theory and practice support broadening the universe of entities capable of qualifying as legal subjects eligible for legal rights to include both natural and artefactual non-humans, a move integral to obtaining socio-ecological justice under Earth system law.
This article outlines the Yarra River Protection Act and the establishment of a statutory independent voice for the Yarra River, the Birrarung Council, in light of the historical legislative neglect ...of indigenous water management rights in the Australian state of Victoria. It then seeks to clarify the distinction between the Yarra River's independent voice and the granting of legal personhood to the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand's Te Awa Tupua Act. It concludes that the grant of legal personhood to a river, represented by a river guardian, will not necessarily meet the river management aspirations of Victoria's Indigenous people.
This paper explores and ultimately affirms the surprising claim that artificial intelligence (AI) can become part of the person, in a robust sense, and examines three ethical and legal implications. ...The argument is based on a rich, legally inspired conception of persons as free and independent rightholders and objects of heightened protection, but it is construed so broadly that it should also apply to mainstream philosophical conceptions of personhood. The claim is exemplified by a specific technology, devices that connect human brains with computers and operate by AI-algorithms. Under philosophically reasonable and empirically realistic conditions, these devices and the AI running them become parts of the person, in the same way as arms, hearts, or mental capacities are. This transformation shall be called
empersonification
. It has normative and especially legal consequences because people have broader and stronger duties regarding other persons (and parts of them) than regarding things. Three consequences with practical implications are: (i) AI-devices cease to exist as independent legal entities and come to enjoy the special legal protection of persons; (ii) therefore, third parties such as manufacturers or authors of software lose (intellectual) property rights in device and software; (iii) persons become responsible for the outputs of the empersonified AI-devices to the same degree that they are for desires or intentions arising from the depths of their unconscious. More generally, empersonification marks a new step in the long history of human–machine interaction that deserves critical ethical reflection and calls for a stronger value-aligned development of these technologies.
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