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.

References

In such a situation, the question of rights is an open question, which needs nuanced discussions centered around concrete real-world projects, instead of purely theoretical argumentation.

— Debunking Robot Rights Metaphysically, Ethically, and Legally  (2404.10072 - Birhane et al., 2024) in Section 6 (Posthumanism)

When it concerns AI, the question is, of course, whether these affordances could at some point be extended to AI and whether the system itself could be held legally liable or accountable.

— A three-dimensional typology of agency for advanced AI systems  (2608.20041 - Fourie, 20 Aug 2026) in Section 4.3, “Controversial instantiations,” subsection “Individual, legal, non-human”