Is Rothblatt's Boundaries Determine Social Agency And Personhood?

As a philosophical matter in jurisprudence, personhood explains the rights and duties of a person within the law’s boundaries. In the past, only human beings have been accorded this identity, which means that non-human agents are not recognised by the law and so cannot legally protect themselves from threats (natural or manmade). However, the line-up behind the new concept, accelerating trends towards cybernetics, and well-ingrained social habits of thought has produced a profound change in where these boundaries are drawn. The central issue within this reconception of boundaries would be to establish whether legal personhood should remain the province of human beings alone or else be extended across all socially recognised agents, including
Given the wide variety of non-human entities – including, but not limited to, sentient animals, human brains, and artificial intelligence systems – it is particularly vital to establish coherent and impartial grounds for the attribution of personhood. Criteria that might form these grounds include the capability of a system to think, feel, understand emotions, interact with other agents, and function autonomously in some sense. Rothblatt’s creation, “BINA48”, is a robot which mirrors the “physical and mental reality of an actual human being”. As it can “express feeling” through “innate understanding”, I argue that this creates solid ground for why machines should have at least some legal protection. Although the device is not human, the fact that it can express emotions suggests that machines should be given legal rights. Moreover, giving robots legal rights might positively impact how modern technology is developed and utilised. By considering machines as sentient beings with rights and protections, we can promote the creation of more ethically designed electronics. In turn, this can result in the creation of technology benefiting society as a whole and help allay worries about machine abuse, which is an underlying issue in the cyber world. By authorising machine rights, they would be subject to regulation and surveillance as humans are, according to Foucault, thus implementing them to be used ethically and diminishing technical misuse. In addition, the implementation of legal personhood’s extension to non-human agents can be achieved with the help of comprehensive changes in the legislative and regulatory areas. According to the analysis of O’Donnell and Arstein-Kerslake, one needs to focus on the abovementioned ‘adaptation of legal systems towards recognition of non-human entities’ personhood. Such an