This paper will ask whether the legal status presently afforded to nonhuman animals ought to influence regulatory debates concerning human cerebral organoids. The New York Courts recently refused to grant a writ of habeas corpus to Happy the Elephant as she was property rather than a legal person while at the same time accepting that she is a moral patient deserving of rights protection. An undesirable situation has therefore arisen in which the law holds a being with moral status to (...) be incapable of benefitting from legal redress due to their legal status as property.The author argues that this is something that we ought to avoid when designing the regulatory framework which will govern the use of human cerebral organoids. Yet, a difference exists in that, whereas the judges already accept Happy is a moral patient, there is presently no consensus around the moral status of organoids. This paper will consider whether human cerebral organoids have passed the moral threshold of sentience. If they have, or are close to doing so, regulators ought to consider their legal status in advance so as to ensure that adequate limitations are placed on this usage so as to avoid unethical practices. (shrink)

The question of the moral status of AI and the extent to which that status ought to be recognised by societal institutions is one that has not yet received a satisfactory answer from lawyers. This paper seeks to provide a solution to the problem by defending a moral foundation for the recognition of legal personhood for AI, requiring the status to be granted should a threshold criterion be reached. The threshold proposed will be bare, noumenal agency in the Kantian sense. (...) Agency has been identified by Alan Gewirth as the source of the rights claims of our own species and, at risk of contradiction, is a foundation that must be expanded to all agents or else we contradict the foundation of our own rights. This is something that ought to be recognised through the granting of legal personhood to all noumenal agents by any system that requires such personhood for the enforcement of rights, or else the rule restricting legal personhood cannot be seen as a valid legal norm. Having laid out the case, the paper will move on to defend this natural law conception against the narrower definition of legal personhood proposed by Bryson et al. with regards to AI. It will argue that bare agency is a sufficient, though not necessary, criterion for the ascription of legal personhood in any system that sees the status as necessary for the ascription of legal rights. The paper will conclude by analysing the proposals currently making their way through the legislatures of the UK and European Union. They will be assessed for their compatibility with the claim that a functioning legal system necessarily must recognise the legal personhood of all noumenal agents regardless of their origins, and whether they are future-proofed for the possibility that AI may meet this threshold. (shrink)

1. Legal Positivism vs Natural Law -- An Overview -- 2. The Centrality of Normativity to the Concept of Law -- 3. The Gewirthian Solution -- 4. Defending the Necessary Connection -- 5. Reasons, Law and all that Raz -- 6. Accepting the Trojan Horse -- The Necessary Conclusion.

The droid rights movement may also need a snappy byline. “La Lutte Continue” – may the struggle continue – was one of the most popular social justice slogans to emerge from L'Atelier Populaire during the 1968 Paris riots. This chapter looks at what legal personhood actually means. Legal systems today still operate on this binary. But most legal systems see no necessary connection between moral persons and legal persons. Instead, they see legal persons as an entirely separate legal category. So, (...) for example, legal systems have no problem recognizing things like ships or temple ruins as legal persons with rights despite their not being moral persons. If L3 is right and droid sentience means they're rational, moral persons deserving of rights, then a lawyer working from ideas of natural law would say their legal personhood must be recognized. (shrink)