Thought Experiment, Political Philosophy, Philosophy, Robot Rights
One of the reasons reforming personhood is so contentious is because nobody likes the idea of change. Before the Great Reform Act, the English gentry was fundamentally opposed to extending the franchise. Giving more people the right to select their MPs would reduce the power of each ballot. After all, if only ten voters can help appoint the local representative, each voter holds an awful lot of power. Certain areas were even worse. Old Sarum was what they called a rotten borough— one landowner controlled the entire constituency. Meanwhile, Manchester didn’t have anyone to protect the interests of thousands. All these injustices were retained for the sake of keeping the British aristocracy happy. Similar logic explains the delay in giving women rights or the reluctance to extinguish plurality voting.
Today, Votes at 16 face opposition by the same conservative tendency. Giving 16 to 17-year-olds the vote would only exaggerate the student vote, forcing a shift to the left. Young people love politicians who pledge to end tuition fees, support the environment and dedicate legislation to tackling homelessness. Unfortunately, all these policies, however well-meaning, cost. Students are notorious for being poor. Hardly the sort of people able to fund government work initiatives set to consume millions. The older generation is undoubtedly who must pay for all these great ideas. Antagonists of reform will hide behind concerns that whatever section of society wants rights are incapable of understanding the full importance of their decisions. The poor were too uneducated, women too emotional and 16-year-olds too inexperienced. Sime will genuinely believe whatever propaganda is created to deny the vote, but somewhere some bureaucrat would have crunched the numbers before deciding reform was a bad idea.
Looking at the problem from ground zero avoids all our unhealthy biases. Robert Nozick built an entire political system on the premise that a coma patient is the best person to govern society. Specifically, those with amnesia are objectively the best statesmen. Why? Because amnesiacs have no way of knowing what position they’ll have. There’s a possibility that the hypothetical coma patient will be a billionaire who owns half the planet. Still, they could equally be homeless, wanted for murder and without a penny to their name. Nozick’s whole theory works even better if the amnesiac is left in a room without mirrors as that would also eliminate two of the last remaining biases. Without any way to catch their reflection, the amnesiac has no way of knowing what they look like. Assuming they're in a strange type of whole-body skin suit (absurd I know but just humour me), race would become a none issue. Actually, appearance would prove to be entirely irrelevant. There would be no way to write laws to tip the balance in one’s own favour. If I knew that I had blue eyes and brown hair, I would subconsciously want to do everything I could to favour those with brown hair and blue eyes. Assuming our amnesiac was given godlike powers, they could very well design a world where brown hair and blue eyes is the pinnacle of human attraction.
Locking the amnesiac away in a tiny cell, shut off from the rest of society, would also ensure agent neutrality. So long as nobody ever comes into contact with the amnesiac, they cannot play favourites. Friends, parents and family members won't receive special treatment, because there are no friends, parents or family to favour in the first place. A waitress being rude after a long day at work will have no impact on the decision-making process because the amnesiac will never get to experience a restaurant. Really, they never get to experience anything at all. Apart from giving them books, films and music, this unspoiled leader must be. The only reason they’re given access to any media is to ensure they don’t go mad.
Having explained precisely what complete objectivity would require, we can now consider what a totally fair assessment of personhood would look like. Clearly, locking someone in a room until they create the ideal State would amount to a major rights abuse. Nobody will ever test Nozick’s thought. Guess we’re going to have to do the next best thing. Human imagination is still an incredible tool. The mind can be used to create endless scenarios. If we can somehow focus enough, we can put ourselves in the same position as the hypothetical amnesiac.
Our first step is to get a piece of paper. Note down a list of characteristics that all human beings share. Intelligence, emotions, logic, a desire for attention are all relevant. Human beings also share genes, physiology and common ancestry. Comparing these lists highlights an important point. List one concerns all of those qualities which relate to a person’s personality. A body does nothing to change how smart a person is. On the other hand, the second list consists of physical factors. Genes impact intelligence, but the whole point of Artificial General Intelligence is that intelligence can be produced without any biological components. Whether people share specific genes is not relevant to determining what rights they should be awarded.
Singer’s support for ape rights works along a similar vein. Great apes share many genetic similarities with homo sapiens, but there are also many differences. Unless biologists discover a ‘personhood’ gene, no single difference in chromosomes is enough to prevent a court giving rights. Physiology is not an essential consideration to personhood because there is no standard form for human physiology. Men and women have different hormones, chemicals and body masses. Even among the same sex, no two individuals are alike. Height, hair colour, the number of toes one has are all variable. Twins are no exception to the rule. Dental records change because of the environment, Fingerprints are totally unique, being imprints from your mother’s womb.
We can also reject treating common ancestry as our defining factor on similar grounds. Sure, going back far enough would allow us to find a great, great, great, great, great grandparent who unites us all. Even if you don't subscribe to the whole Adam and Eve style creation story, the laws of probability dictate that our species is so inbred by now that we're all in some way related. Still, tracing humanity’s lineage cannot be enough to create a criteria for personhood for two reasons.
- Aliens will not share a common lineage with homo sapiens. Yes, concerning ourselves with extraterrestrials is probably overly optimistic. We haven’t met life from another world yet, meaning arranging our whole legal system around the possibility is perhaps extreme. Personally, this objection is compelling, but that’s because I agree with the Kantian style tenants of Metalaw. Taking the point to its logical extreme, there may very well be a civilisation out there which is by pure chance functionally identical to us, yet entirely unrelated. Would refusing them personhood really be justified? In reality, the argument won’t convince most people, but it's worth keeping the possibility in mind.
- Going back far enough would mean bananas could claim legal protection. Again, this objection feels slightly absurd. No politician would ever take office riding on a manifesto declaring that fruit bowls now contain people. Luckily, I'm not suggesting any of the sort— reductio ad absurdum is a great rhetorical device. Without setting an arbitrary cutoff point, common ancestry is no use when defining personhood because all life on Earth comes from the same set of single-cell organisms. Exciting, I know.
So physical factors are not sufficient to award personhood. Given the evidence I've provided, that claim reads like a massive assertion, but that's because it is. There's no one master argument through which I can discount all physical factors from consideration. A coherent assessment of personhood may well specify I particular height range, mineral composition, body temperature that all candidates must attain to pass. Notice that I choose the word 'coherent', not desirable here. That's because there are lots of laws out there which are coherent but not necessarily desirable. Some tyrant with absolute power might well pass a law stating that anybody over the age of 60 must face mandatory euthanasia. Their decision would be logically coherent; however, most of us wouldn't be too thrilled with the prospect.
Going back to our amnesiac ruler, it is possible to see why a broad bar preventing physical factors entering the picture when we are assessing personhood might be desirable. Remember, according to my criteria, the amnesiac is unable to see themselves. I didn't just mention that weird full-body suit for the amusing imagery. If you've seen Ex Machina, you may know where I'm going with this. What's to say that the amnesiac has to be a homo sapien? Homo sapien prioritas wouldn't taint an utterly neutral agent because they would not themselves know they were a homo sapien. Under the suit, anything could be lurking. If we wanted to, we could have Coco the chimpanzee design the world from behind the curtain. To reuse an old example, there could be some strange arachnid people living in a far off solar system. Nozick's thought experiment is intended to be universal in scope, meaning that it should equally apply to them if they want to create the perfect society. Or we could Terminator this and say robots are rising up. They too will need a way to govern themselves. In an ideal world, they also will want to avoid the same biases.
Looking back on this article, it may be slightly tricky to discover what I've been trying to get at. Lots of time was spent describing the political theory of Robert Nozick using an absurd thought experiment without even using the word ‘robot’ once. If I were to try and condense my thesis into a short summary, it would be this. Personhood, are at least specific rights, have been restricted in the past. Looking back, most of the time, this had to do with physical characteristics which had little to do with the right being claimed. If we were creating the world from ground zero, with no idea where we were going to end up, considering these characteristics would be too risky— what if our creation excluded us? The only solution is to ignore the physical entirely. Any restrictions we imposed would have to do with the psychological.