The Legal Personhood of Artificial Intelligences

The chapter scrutinizes the legal personhood of artificial intelligences (AIs). It starts by distinguishing three relevant contexts. Most discussions of AI legal personhood focus either on the moral value of AIs (ultimate-value context); on whether AIs could or should be held responsible (responsibility context); or on whether they could acquire a more independent role in commercial transactions (commercial context). The chapter argues that so-called strong AIs—capable of performing similar tasks as human beings—can indeed function as legal persons regardless of whether such AIs are worthy of moral consideration. If an AI can function as a legal person, it can be granted legal personhood on somewhat similar grounds as a human collectivity. The majority of the chapter is focused on the role of AIs in commercial contexts, and new theoretical tools are proposed that would help distinguish different commercial AI legal personhood arrangements.

A Short History of the Right-Holding Person

The chapter is a historical survey of the genealogy of legal personhood, offering context for how two central notions of modern legal philosophy—personhood and rights—developed. It traces how the Roman notions of personhood inspired Renaissance-era French and German scholars to start using persona in a distinct legal sense that would then, in nineteenth-century Germany, develop into a definition of persons as right-holders. This view was imported into the English-speaking world by John Austin, who had studied in Bonn, Germany. Austin would later influence the works of such influential jurisprudents as John Salmond and Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld.

The Incidents of Legal Personhood

The chapter presents a new theory of legal personhood. It argues that legal personhood is a cluster property, and best understood in terms of disseverable but interconnected incidents. It sets out by distinguishing passive and active incidents, and then enumerates and presents both types of incidents. While doing so, the chapter highlights the benefits of an incident-based approach to legal personhood. After presenting the incidents, the notion of a ‘subject of law’ is offered as an alternative way of analysing legal personhood. The chapter concludes by addressing some of the connections between personhood and legal personhood.

Rights and Persons— Hohfeldian Analysis

The chapter criticizes the Orthodox View of legal personhood for being internally inconsistent and simplistic as well as lacking in explanatory power. It focuses on four different formulations of the Orthodox View, and points out various deficiencies in all of them. The main criticism is that all of the formulations—when assessed in light of contemporary theories of rights—fail to explain jurists’ widely held convictions regarding who or what is a legal person. The critique is based on the Hohfeldian analysis of legal relations, which is also presented in this chapter.

Who or What Can be a Legal Person?

The chapter assesses the rather popular claim that anything can be endowed with legal personhood. This ‘everything-goes’ view is often supported by examples such as the putative legal personhood of Indian idols and the Whanganui River in New Zealand. The chapter exposes a conflation of two senses of the phrase ‘legal person’, which can refer both to the holders of legal positions (rights and duties) or to the legal positions themselves. This conflation often underlies the everything-goes view, rendering it unsustainable. Instead, one must either have the capacity to act or the capacity for claim-rights in order to qualify as a potential legal person. As rivers can neither act nor hold claim-rights, rivers cannot be legal persons. The Whanganui River arrangement should rather be understood as endowing a collectivity—the Maori and other sentient beings who are dependent on the river—with legal personhood.

Collectivities as Legal Persons

This chapter examines corporate legal personhood as well as the legal status of collectivities in general. It exposes a number of problems the Orthodox View has as regards the rights and duties of collectivities. For instance, many constitutions and human rights documents recognize the rights of minorities, but minorities are regardless generally not taken to be corporations or legal persons. The chapter offers a different explanation of corporations. It applies social ontology to argue that even non-incorporated group agents can hold legal rights. Regardless, such groups are not legal persons. What distinguishes corporations from other groups is not that they hold rights, but rather that they are endowed with a significant number of the incidents of legal personhood: they can own property, sue, and so on. The chapter concludes by considering whether collectives that are not group agents could be legal persons.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the reader to the topic of legal personhood. It presents the central concepts, terminology, and legal doctrines pertaining to legal personhood, and explains the relevance of the notion for various contemporary legal debates. The chapter also presents the book’s methodology, which is a version of the reflective equilibrium. It thus lays the groundwork for one of the central theses the book: that the Orthodox View of legal personhood is unable to explain many of the convictions regarding legal personhood that are accepted widely by jurists in the Western world.

Legal Personhood in Normative Reasoning

This concluding chapter considers the role of legal personhood in normative argumentation, distinguishing normative questions that are ‘internal’ to law from ‘external’ normative questions. Particular focus is placed on the different normative claims regarding the legal status of animals. The chapter shows how the Bundle Theory can structure the most central accounts, including the widely-adopted ‘welfarist approach’, the ‘habeas corpus approach’ of the Nonhuman Rights Project, as well as the ‘abolitionist approach’ of Gary Francione. The import of the term ‘person’ in legal materials is discussed. The chapter ends with a conclusion that ties together the book as a whole.