Rights in a Posthuman Paradigm

Investigate how rights should be conceived, allocated, and operationalized within a fully endorsed posthuman framework that dissolves traditional human–machine boundaries into complex bio-socio-technical constellations, ensuring the analysis is grounded in concrete real-world projects rather than abstract theorizing.

Background

The paper argues that a thorough embrace of Latourian posthumanism would dissolve the traditional categories of human and robot, replacing them with complex constellations of interconnected dependencies that cannot be fully engineered. In such a context, conventional debates about robot personhood become ill-posed.

The authors note that if we move beyond modernist distinctions and attend to these distributed networks, then questions about who or what has rights, and which rights apply, cannot be settled in the abstract. They explicitly state that the question of rights remains open and requires nuanced, context-specific deliberation tied to concrete projects.