This chapter seeks to strengthen the account of the Principle of Multispecies Legality offered in the previous chapter by responding to potential queries and concerns around the proposal’s structure, scope, and feasibility. The outlined concerns are as follows: that the PML is an attempt to redefine legal personhood; that a focus on interests is too inclusive, in that in opening the doors of legal inclusion to a relatively wide range of beings and entities it would put undesirable constraints on human activity; that a focus on interests is too limited in that it doesn’t capture the full scope of animals’ capabilities; that the PML will result in the equal treatment of humans and all other animals; that we shouldn’t base a being’s worth on their possession of a particular characteristic; and that the PML will be too unfeasible to implement.

The concluding chapter reiterates the goal of the book: to offer a solution to animals’ lack of legal inclusion by offering a new foundation of legal subjectivity. The Principle of Multispecies Legality provides such a foundation for animals and, indeed, all those beings and entities with interests. By contrast with the present paradigm of legal personhood, the PML is not premised on a vision of the ‘archetypal’ human which serves to exclude not only animals but also many vulnerable human groups. The PML is also an improvement over the rights of nature, in that it more straightforwardly recognises the interests and worth of individual animals and does not maintain the ontological barrier between humans and all other nature. Finally, we are reminded that making change takes a multispecies village: that the PML is only as good as those who are willing to implement it. In order to ensure real change for animals and other interested beings, we need to work to encourage greater respect for the non-human world.

Legal personhood is the status accorded those, like humans, who are recognised as the subjects of the legal system. As such, many argue that we can address animals’ weak legal position by having them recognised as legal persons. This chapter first considers what legal personhood is and highlights how this concept has been heavily influenced by metaphysical accounts of personhood that privilege characteristics associated with the ‘archetypal’ human. Through a discussion of cases involving animal plaintiffs, the chapter shows how a range of different – and, at times, conflicting – conceptions of personhood have influenced the courts’ understanding of legal personhood. In addition to the judicial inconsistency that legal personhood seems to invite, we see evidence of how particular conceptions of personhood have been operationalised to exclude animals (conceptions that also serve to further marginalise vulnerable human groups). This leads the chapter to conclude that legal personhood is not a desirable solution to animals’ lack of legal inclusion. More than this, the chapter argues that a concept like personhood should nor underpin legal subjecthood for any being, human or otherwise.

With the criminal law’s duty to advance social justice at the site of culpability evaluation established, Chapter 2 provides the substance of that duty and offers a conceptual tool to aid in its fulfilment, in the form of the Real Person Approach (RPA). The chapter introduces the target of the RPA as the dominant construct of personhood represented by excuse doctrine, and identifies its contribution to both moral and social injustice, through the subversion of core criminal law principles of proportionality and parsimony, respectively. The RPA responds by offering a guiding framework which helps to identify and explain these injustices, and aids with the challenge of holding people to account for wrongdoing in a way that advances social justice. Finally, the chapter explains the core features of the RPA in terms of acknowledging agency as vulnerable, responding with recognitive justice, and maintaining conceptual feasibility.

“Everyone has a price at which he sells himself”: Immanuel Kant quotes this remark in the 1793 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, attributing it to “a member of English Parliament.” This chapter argues, however, that the context of the quotation in the Religion alludes to the arresting pedagogical practices of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who famously said that “different people sell themselves at different prices.” The chapter argues that there are two sides of Epictetus’ pedagogical strategies: a jolting side meant to expose self-deception and practical inconsistency; and an uplifting side meant to arouse the resources by which it is possible to progress towards virtue – specifically, our sense of kinship with the divine insofar as we are rational. This chapter argues that Kant develops a conception of self-respect in later practical works that plausibly draws on Epictetus, and his distinctive version of the traditional Stoic account of rational agency.

Preschoolers purposefully seek to understand the environment. Their social world expands, as they work hard to interact with peers. Accompanying this active stance are surges in memory and other aspects of understanding the self in the world. Coherence in the organization of the emerging person becomes much more apparent, in both behavior and the child’s internal world, as seen in the child’s representation. Inquisitiveness and beginning understanding of causality are major strengths of the toddler. Because this understanding is limited, toddlers may at times attribute too much credence to their own perspective and too great a role to the self in causation. Thus, they can feel bad when negative experiences such as divorce happen, believing that they are the cause.

The last several years have featured the development of legal longtermism – the set of theories associated with the view that law should be concerned with ensuring the long-term future goes well. Although recent literature has shown that the principles underlying legal longtermism are widely endorsed across the Anglosphere, it remains an open question whether these principles are endorsed across cultures. Here we surveyed laypeople (n=2,938) from ten countries – Australia, Canada, Chile, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, United Kingdom and United States – regarding law’s role in protecting future generations. We find participants in our sample widely endorse (a) increasing legal protection for future humans beyond current levels; (b) extending personhood and standing to some subset of humans living in the near and far future; and (c) prioritizing the interests of future people over those of present people in some national and international lawmaking scenarios. Taken together, these results suggest the notion of granting rights and legal protection to future generations is endorsed cross-culturally, carrying wide-ranging implications for legal theory, doctrine, and policy.

The chapter returns to what has been called the “central paradox of American history,” the ostensible contradiction between this nation’s declared liberal ideals (“all men” being promised the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) and its sanctioning of slavery, the supreme denial of liberty. It focuses on how antebellum debates (literary, political, and theological) over the moral and political legitimacy of slavery were ultimately debates over “personhood” in order to make clear that the conceptual category of the “person” (the center of liberal thought) needs to be understood as a historically contingent – rather than absolute – identity. Noting how deeply modern accounts of slavery remain indebted to the liberal presumption that slavery is wrong precisely to the extent that those enslaved possess a fixed, transhistorical personhood (a personhood that racism, ideology, or self-interest too often obscures), the chapter seeks to leave behind arguments over the conflict between slavery and liberalism and ultimately asks whether it is possible to imagine a liberatory politics that does not require the “person” to be at its center.

This chapter explores Pentecostal conversion as both an affective and a political process. It considers the kind of subjects young urban Pentecostals are called upon to become: organised, enterpreneurial, armed not only with a transformed heart but with a ‘vision’ for their future and a ‘strategic plan’. This subject both converges with and diverges from the RPF’s attempts to create ‘ideal’ subjects who are able to participate in the country’s post-genocide development. While some young Pentecostals benefited from such self-making, others became disillusioned. Instead, they highlighted the limits of the Pentecostal project and its inability to deliver the bright future they felt they had been promised.

This chapter comprehensively lays out all the possible ways that artificial intelligence (AI) might interact with Jewish sources as their relationship develops over the next many years. It divides the scope of the relationship into three parts. First, it engages with questions of moral agency and their potential interactions with Jewish law, and suggests that this path, while enticing, may not be particularly fruitful. Second, it suggests that Jewish historical sources generally distinguish human value from human uniqueness, and that there is therefore quite a bit of room to think of an AI as a person, if we so choose, without damaging the value of human beings. Finally, it considers how Jewish thought might respond to AI as a new height of human innovation, and how the human–AI relationship shares many characteristics with the God–human relationship as imagined in Jewish sources.

This chapter reviews progress in the field of artificial intelligence, and considers the special case of the android: a human-like robot that people would accept as similar to humans in how they perform and behave in society. An android as considered here does not have the purpose to deceive humans into believing that the android is a human. Instead, the android self-identifies as a non-human with its own integrity as a person. To make progress on android intelligence, artificial intelligence research needs to develop computer models of how people engage in relationships, how people explain their experience in terms of stories and how people reason about the things in life that are most significant and meaningful to them. A functional capacity for religious reasoning is important because the intelligent android needs to understand its role and its relationships with other persons. Religious reasoning is taken here not to mean matters of specific confessional faith and belief according to established doctrines but about the cognitive processes involved in negotiating significant values and relationships with tangible and intangible others.

This chapter works through multiple valences of queerness in relation to blackness. Alongside the presence of non-normative sexual practices, intimacies, and identifications within black literatures this chapter looks at ways that blackness is often posited as already queer, part of the residue of having been hailed as property. In this reading, blackness destabilizes or “queers” the category of the person. This happens through the blurring of the categories of person and object as well as the possibility of making a distinction between an individual and a collective social identity. We might consider this person-object blurriness to be one of the effects of the processes of commodification that enslavement entailed. This estrangement from personhood though enfleshment, objectification, and loss of the mother also introduces literary possibilities of resistance in a queer register, including movements to mourn and re-find the mother, sonic resistance, and other uses of the flesh to produce forms of embodiment that evade traditional forms of capture. Here, queerness is related to finding different ways to describe orientations toward the world and pleasure.

The Consolation defends many claims about human nature and personhood, and depicts an exemplary human person, Boethius the character. This chapter synthesizes the book’s often puzzling and apparently divergent claims, while illustrating them with the depiction of the character of Boethius. It begins by outlining Boethius’ account of human powers and human nature, and then considers the Consolation’s account of human personhood. While Boethius’ account of personhood in the Consolation lacks the technical precision found in his Trinitarian works, he does give an account of some fundamental characteristics of persons consonant with his more explicit treatment in other texts. Finally, the chapter considers three distinctive themes in the Consolation’s account of human persons. First, this text controversially depicts human nature as able to change into that of a god or of a beast. Second, the Consolation depicts all human persons as microcosms, including within ourselves all aspects of the cosmos. Third, Boethius, like many classical writers, depicts human persons as most understandable in relation to beauty. Since this theme sums up earlier ones, the chapter closes there.

Technology has served a recurrent role as a utopian imaginary for speculative fiction writers and consumers. As a utopian promise, technology appears to provide individuals, communities, and whole societies with the means to overcome nature – whether it is base human natures, relationships with one’s environment, or the perceived limitations of one’s body. This chapter focuses on two similar technological fantasies, James Cameron’s Terminator films and Martha Wells’ Murderbot series. In both series, central figures – namely the T-800 played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Murderbot – approximate being human but are limited by their technological being. Yet, in being not-fully-human, they expose how technology always serves as a false utopian promise: there is no way out of our humanness through technology. In this way, technological fantasies serve as a form of horror, at once tempting readers with possibilities, but revealing those possibilities to be empty – or malignant.