Assessing contemporary legislative proposals for their compatibility with a natural law case for AI legal personhood

Abstract

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.

The Moral Consideration of Artificial Entities: A Literature Review

“…They argue that the “phrasing” used by robots “can be just as important as the message itself” Jaynes ( 2020 ) This article analyzes the rights that could be granted to “non-biological intelligence possessing legal and civic duties akin to those possessed by humanity today,” presenting relevant jurisprudential evidence. The article encourages “capabilities-based altruism” towards artificial entities and the urgent granting of relevant rights Johnson and Miller ( 2008 ) This paper focuses mostly on moral agency, but briefly cites’ Sullins’ ( 2005 ) comments about moral consideration to critique “determinist” thinking about artificial entities, arguing that artificial “functional equivalents” are not the moral equivalents of other entities Johnson and Verdicchio ( 2018 ) Johnson and Verdicchio critique the analogy between animals and robots from a number of perspectives, including the moral status of the entities themselves (emphasizing that “animals suffer and robots do not” and “even those of the future will not suffer”), their legal status, and the “Impact on social behaviour: how we treat robots and each other.” There is some review of the empirical evidence Jowitt ( 2020 ) Jowitt argues defends “a moral foundation for the recognition of legal personhood for AI, requiring the status to be granted” if they reach a threshold of “bare, noumenal agency in the Kantian sense” against counterarguments, such as by Bryson et al ( 2017 ). Jowitt does not see this threshold as having been met yet.…”

Robots and AI as Legal Subjects? Disentangling the Ontological and Functional Perspective

“…or attribute them ad hoc legal personhood similarly to what we do with corporations. While the second option is, in technical terms, possible and compatible with the tools offered by the legal systems, the first one depends on our understanding of the relevant properties that would make a robot sufficiently like us, to justify its qualification as a legal subject ( Kingwell, 2020 ; Osborne, 2020 ; Jowitt, 2021 )—which we seek to identify throughout this paper.…”

Gradient Legal Personhood for AI Systems—Painting Continental Legal Shapes Made to Fit Analytical Molds

“…That is, natural law is an approach best suited for times of change, when jurists need to use their judgement to make analogies and, when that does not suffice, to create law to apply to new social realities. It is unsurprising in this light that a case for a natural law conception of AI legal personhood was made and assessed in the context of contemporary legislative proposals, concluding, however, that the time for creating such a concept is not ripe yet ( Jowitt, 2021 ).…”