The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations and Robots - Hardcover

by Lisa Siraganian (Author)

SHOULD NONHUMANS HAVE RIGHTS IN LAW AND POLITICS?

Over the last twenty-five years, the concept of per-sonhood has become central to many contentious debates. Corporations have won free speech protections, as if they were individuals. The right to life or freedom has been claimed on behalf of fetuses, trees, and elephants. The fund of human rights is spilling over into the nonhuman.

The Problem of Personhood reveals the unsettling consequences of granting rights to imagined persons, such as Sophia the robot citizen or New Zealand's Whanganui River. Synthesizing the political and phil­osophical debates on personhood and drawing on a varied cast of thinkers that includes Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Dr. Seuss, Lisa Siraganian un­covers the disturbing impact of this contemporary development. Awarding rights to robots and rivers all too easily becomes a legal tool to turn people into capital. When robot Sophia is made a citizen, "she" is transformed into a subject in the law without the corre­sponding legal duties that protect us from her.

At the root of this trend is the US Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling that grants First Amendment rights to corporations as if they were individuals. The result has not been the transformation of things into humans so much as humans into things, when animals and the environment would be better protected with reference to our humanity rather than to theirs.

Author Biography

LISA SIRAGANIAN is the J. R.Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities and Professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Liter­ature at Johns Hopkins University. Her work has won multiple awards and has been supported by fellow­ships from the American Academy of Arts and Sci­ences, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Siraganian has written award-winning scholarly monographs, including Mod­ernism's Other Work: The Art Object's Political Life and Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons, books that bridge literary criticism, art criticism, and legal and philosophical scholarship. More recently, she was a co-editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, 10th edition.