Not all persons are humans. Linda MacDonald-Glenn, a bioethicist at California State University Monterey Bay and a faculty member at the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical Center, says the law already considers non-humans as rights bearing individuals. This is a significant development because we’re already establishing precedents that could pave a path towards granting human-equivalent rights to AI in the future.
“For example, in the United States corporations are recognized as legal persons,” she told Gizmodo. “Also, other countries are recognizing the interconnected nature of existence on this Earth: New Zealand recently recognized animals as sentient beings, calling for the development and issuance of codes of welfare and ethical conduct, and the High Court of India recently declared the Ganges and Yamuna rivers as legal entities that possessed the rights and duties of individuals.”
Efforts also exist both in the United States and elsewhere to grant personhood rights to certain nonhuman animals, such as great apes, elephants, whales, and dolphins, to protect them against such things as undue confinement, experimentation, and abuse. Unlike efforts to legally recognize corporations and rivers as persons, this isn’t some kind of legal hack. The proponents of these proposals are making the case for bona fide personhood, that is, personhood based on the presence of certain cognitive abilities, such as self-awareness.
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