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

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.

About the Author :
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.

Review :
In this brilliant interdisciplinary study, Lisa Siraganian brings complexity to the conventional ethics and politics of personification. Not all people have always been considered persons, and nowadays many non-humans are - from corporate entities to AI conversation partners. Denying claims is as fraught as expanding the circle of rights, and Siraganian helps think past the most obvious stances, going to the heart of our moral and legal debates. Siraganian's book offers not an apology for anthropocentrism, but rather, a clear-sighted compass for thinking through personhood in its newest, broadest, thorniest guises. Transdisciplinary in approach, the book demonstrates how much rides politically on "who" and "what" make a successful claim to personhood status, and it identifies dangers, ascendant since the 1990s, of personhood's enhanced legal and extra-legal traction. Most of us on the left are deeply opposed to the decision in Citizens United that conferred on corporations the right to freedom of speech; Lisa Siraganian is too. But her brilliant The Problem of Personhood argues that the damage done by the idea of the corporate person goes far beyond the difficulties it has created for fair elections. From the description of the fetus as a person through claims made on behalf of the personhood of animals, rivers and trees up to the emerging notion of the ePerson, she shows how the corporation has provided a model for the invention of new persons each of "whom" embodies the privileging of property and the impoverishment of the public sphere. And against such expansive personhood she argues for a commitment to solidarity not reducible to the solidarity between legal entities.