In this chapter, the philosopher Christoph Durt elaborates a novel view on AI and its relation to humans. He contends that AI is neither merely a tool, nor an artificial subject, nor necessarily a simulation of human intelligence. These misconceptions of AI have led to grave misunderstandings of the opportunities and dangers of AI. A more comprehensive concept of AI is needed to better understand the possibilities of responsible AI. The chapter shows the roots of the misconceptions in the Turing Test. The author argues that the simplicity of the setup of the Turing Test is deceptive, and that Turing was aware that the text exchanges can develop in much more intricate ways than usually thought. The Turing Test only seemingly avoids difficult philosophical questions by passing on the burden to an evaluator, who is part of the setup, and hides in plain sight his or her decisive contribution. Durt shows that, different from all previous technology, AI processes meaningful aspects of the world as experienced and understood by humans. He delineates a more comprehensive picture according to which AI integrates into the human lifeworld through its interrelations with humans and data.

This chapter makes the case for judicial morality as a safeguard against result-selective reasoning, a decision-making flaw especially pernicious in human rights adjudication. Human rights claims are more value-laden than other judicial work. They can tempt judges to depart from disciplined judging according to the rule of law. One purpose of the rule of law is to constrain discretionary judicial power. Research into the psychology of judging supports the need for constraints. But the legal system affords opportunities – margins of judicial manoeuvre – to engage in result-selective reasoning, from the indeterminacy of human rights texts, the replacement of rules with standards, and the adoption of proportionality analysis. The rule of law’s constraints are not self-enforcing and cannot safeguard against the failure of judges to abide by them. What is required is commitment to judicial morality comprising the modes of judicial responsibility: do no harm, and then, do the right thing, for the right reason, in the right way, at the right time, and in the right words. When judges neglect these moral imperatives, they undermine the quest for consistent adjudication that underpins justice.

The category of ‘human rights law’ is sometimes limited to bills and charters of rights on the model of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to the case law of courts interpreting and applying these legal measures. This chapter argues that the measures that realise human rights in the law are the everyday, unremarkable measures that make up the full corpus of legal materials directing what may, must, and must not be done. The argument explores how all sound positive law finds its source in the human goods through one of two modes of derivation: deduction or specification. These are the same two modes of positive law’s derivation from natural law, for the reach of human rights law is more or less coextensive with the reach of positive law and the human goods from which are derived human rights law are the same human goods from which are derived natural law’s practical principles and precepts.

This chapter explores connections among one ‘virtue of acknowledged dependence’, humility, as elaborated by Augustine; the right or just according to nature; and human rights. The opening section argues that in defending virtuous humility, Augustine defends a new account of natural right, supporting this thesis with a reading of The City of God, books I-V. After this analysis, our focus shifts a central framer of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Lebanese philosopher-diplomat Charles Habib Malik. Drawing on the archive of Malik’s papers and on his publications and lectures, we offer a select history of Malik’s study of Augustine’s work and his distinctively Augustinian perspective on themes such as humility, natural right and natural law, and human rights. We turn next to the text of the Universal Declaration, considering its Augustinian affinities as well as key divergences from Augustine’s views. The final sections of the chapter argue that Augustinian notions of humility and pride are central to Malik’s appraisal of the Declaration and the contemporary human rights project more generally, in their substance as well as their modes of expression.

In this chapter, the law scholar Boris Paal identifies a conflict between two objectives pursued by the data protection law, the comprehensive protection of privacy and personal rights and the facilitation of an effective and competitive data economy. Focusing on the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the author recognises its failure to address the implications of AI, the development of which depends on the access to large amounts of data. The regulation is observed as not only immensely burdensome for controllers but also likely to significantly limit the output of AI-based applications. In general, the main principles of the GDPR seem to be in direct conflict with the functioning and underlying mechanisms of AI applications, which evidently, were not considered sufficiently whilst the regulation was being drafted. Hence, Paal argues that establishing a separate legal basis governing the permissibility of processing operations using AI-based applications should be considered; the enhanced legal framework should seek to reconcile data protection with the openness for new opportunities of AI developments.

This introductory chapter identifies the key questions, themes and debates addressed within the Handbook on Natural Law and Human Rights, and provides a conceptual overview of and integrated perspective on its contents. In particular, it argues that there is a perennial relationship between human rights and the phenomenon of natural law, which is revealed when we consider how human rights claims can justify the moral demands made on other agents and on the political community. Without prior moral duties – a natural law – human rights claims are impugned by the ‘individualist fallacy’, whereby the potential value of the right to the claimant is presumed sufficient to impose overriding duties, without due consideration being paid to the constitutive social commitments necessary to make that value a matter of common concern and action. The failure to come to grips with this problem, we argue, has led to certain blindspots in contemporary human rights theory and practice. This chapter draws to a close by identifying the key benefits we see accruing from a natural law theory of human rights.

This Chapter argues that natural law philosophy gives the best conceptual resources for understanding the rights of the family in seminal international human rights instruments. The expression, ‘rights of the family,’ includes a broader discussion about marriage and the right to married life, rights of parents and children, the human person and his or her dignity. The interpretation of the texts is based on a good faith reading of the ordinary meaning of the words in their context taking into consideration the text’s object and purpose. Various challenges to the said interpretation are considered and responses to them are provided.

Natural law theory in the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) tradition is grounded in a metaphysics of essentialism and teleology, and in turn grounds a theory of natural rights. This chapter offers a brief exposition of the metaphysical ideas in question, explains how the A-T tradition takes a natural law moral system to follow from them, and also explains how in turn the existence of certain basic natural rights follows from natural law. It then explains how the teleological foundations of natural law entail not only that natural rights exist, but also that they are limited or qualified in certain crucial ways. The right to free speech is used as a case study to illustrate these points. Finally, the chapter explains the sense in which the natural rights doctrine generated by A-T natural law theory amounts to a theory of human rights, specifically.

The idea of determinatio – first identified and analysed in natural law theory – is crucial for understanding international human rights adjudication. Human rights, as they appear formulated in international human rights treatises and declarations, require specification, implementation, concretisation, i.e., determinatio, at the domestic level. I argue that there are good reasons for this to be so. One such reason is that determinatio allows for the application of a norm to be sensitive to the particular circumstances in which it takes place. Determinatio entails deference in human rights adjudication, the latter being the legal consequence of the reasonable space for discretion granted to states which is entailed by determiatio in international human rights law. Close attention to determinatio allows us to see well-known doctrines of deference (such as the doctrine of the margin of appreciation, of regional consensus and of incrementalism) in a different light—not as concessions to state sovereignty, but as grounded on reasons internal to the legal practice of human rights law, of which determinatio is an integral part.

In this chapter, political philosopher Alex Leveringhaus asks whether Lethal Autonomous Weapons (AWS) are morally repugnant and whether this entails that they should be prohibited by international law. To this end, Leveringhaus critically surveys three prominent ethical arguments against AWS: firstly, AWS create ‘responsibility gaps’; secondly, that their use is incompatible with human dignity; and ,thirdly, that AWS replace human agency with artificial agency. He argues that some of these arguments fail to show that AWS are morally different from more established weapons. However, the author concludes that AWS are currently problematic due to their lack of predictability.

In this chapter, the law scholar Ebrahim Afsah outlines different implications of AI for the area of national security. He argues that while AI overlaps with many challenges to the national security arising from cyberspace, it also creates new risks, including the emergence of a superintelligence in the future, the development of autonomous weapons, the enhancement of existing military capabilities, and threats to foreign relations and economic stability. Most of these risks, however, Afsah concludes, can be subsumed under existing normative frameworks.

To answer the question of what responsible AI means, the authors, Jaan Tallinn and Richard Ngo, propose a framework for the deployment of AI which focuses on two concepts: delegation and supervision. The framework aims towards building ‘delegate AIs’ which lack goals of their own but can perform any task delegated to them. However, AIs trained with hardcoded reward functions, or even human feedback, often learn to game their reward signal instead of accomplishing their intended tasks. Thus, Tallinn and Ngo argue that it will be important to develop more advanced techniques for continuous high-quality supervision – for example, by evaluating the reasons which AIs give for their choices of actions. These supervision techniques might be made scalable by training AIs to generate reward signals for more advanced AIs. Given their current limitations, however, Tallinn and Ngo call for caution when developing new AI: we must be aware of the risks and overcome self-interest and dangerous competitive incentives in order to avoid them.

This chapter argues that there are two basic approaches to natural law, especially but not exclusively in the Jewish tradition. In the first, natural law is essentially concerned with human goods. In the second, natural law is essentially concerned with human rights. The first approach is that of ‘natural theology’. The second approach is what is called here ‘normative theology’. For natural theology, natural law is rooted in a larger, beneficial, teleological Nature, ruled by the Creator-God. For normative theology, the ‘nature’ in natural law is human nature, which is essentially lawful, having been made in God’s image by the lawgiving Creator-God. The chapter analyses and critiques the first approach to natural law, while the second is analysed and its theological and philosophical preferability advocated. From a theological perspective, rights are more closely related to divinely commanded duties (mitsvot) than goods are. From a philosophical perspective, connecting natural law with human rights as divine entitlements avoids the problem of deriving prescriptions from descriptive states of affairs; a problem natural law based on natural theology does not seem able to overcome.

Does the concept of natural rights have roots, logical and historical, in the concept of natural law? Our answer is, ‘it depends’. By this, we mean that some conceptions across Western history do not in fact allow for the derivation of natural rights in the subjective sense. In contrast, others are conceived such that natural rights follow logically therefrom. Our premise is that talking about ‘natural law’ in the singular – at least in the period from Roman times to sixteenth-century – represents a distortion of on-the-ground realities.

The philosopher Wilfried Hinsch focuses on statistical discrimination by means of computational profiling. He defines statistical profiling as an estimate of what individuals will do by considering the group of people they can be assigned to. The author explores which criteria of fairness and justice are appropriate for the assessment of computational profiling. According to Hinsch, grounds of discrimination such as gender or ethnicity do not explain when or why it is wrong to discriminate. Thus, Hinsch argues that discrimination constitutes a rule-guided social practice that imposes unreasonable burdens on specific people. He argues that, on the one hand, statistical profiling is a part of human nature and not by itself wrongful discrimination. However, on the other hand, even statistically correct profiles can be unacceptable considering reasons of procedural fairness or substantive justice. Because of this, Hinsch suggests a fairness index for profiles to determine procedural fairness; and argues that because AI systems do not rely on human stereotypes or rather limited data, computational profiling may be a better safeguard of fairness than humans.

The chapter aims to serve as a conceptual sketch for the intricacies involved in autonomous algorithmic collusion, including the notion of concerted practices for cases that would otherwise elude the cartel prohibition. Stefan Thomas, a law scholar, starts by assessing how algorithms can influence competition in markets before dealing with the traditional criteria of distinction between explicit and tacit collusion, which might reveal a potential gap in the existing legal framework regarding algorithmic collusion. Finally, he analyses whether the existing cartel prohibition can be construed in a way that captures the phenomenon appropriately. This chapter shows how enforcement paradigms that hinge on descriptions of the inner sphere and conduct of human beings may collapse when applied to the effects precipitated by independent AI based computer agents.