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 phil?osophical debates on personhood and drawing on a varied cast of thinkers that includes Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Dr. Seuss, Lisa Siraganian un?covers 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 corre?sponding 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.
eBook - ePub
The Problem of Personhood
Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations and Robots
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
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Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Half Title Page
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Introduction: Unbecoming Us
- Chapter 1: Artificial, Inc.: Theorizing the Expansive Person
- Chapter 2: Unborn Fictions: Fetal Persons and Their Women Containers
- Chapter 3: Animals: The Majority Group to Which We Belong
- Chapter 4: Tongueless Trees: Standing on Environmental Persons
- Chapter 5: ePersons, as If: Temptations of Mimicry and Artifice
- Conclusion: Letting Persons Go
- Acknowledgments
- Index
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Yes, you can access The Problem of Personhood by Lisa Siraganian in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politics & International Relations & Civil Rights in Politics. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.