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Unexpected things that are people

bengoldhaber.substack.com

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Re: Unexpected things that are people

#4

Post by metada5e »

I recommend reading the book 'For Profit' for deeper knowledge on this topic - the book covers the origin of corporations and the ideas lying behind legal personhood. It sounds like a dry read but it is surprisingly well written and as much about history as about law. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60568507-for-profit

Criminal and Civil liability are the two topics to focus on - you will find that non-human entities have very limited categories of crimes that apply to them. This is a key topic in the emergence of 'seemingly conscious' or 'seemingly unitary' AGI compute entities.

Also worth noting that Common Law tends to be the primary mode of law globally, even in counties that are nominally Code Napoleon (aka Civil Law) countries.

Re: Unexpected things that are people

#5

Post by chemotaxis »

Wouldn't personal property in the US fall under the same criteria, in the sense that the government can sue the property itself (civil forfeiture)?

But I think the boring answer here is that we sometimes need legal abstractions. If they don't exist, Microsoft is no longer a distinct entity; it's 200,000 people who for some reason talk to each other, and you can't really audit their finances, punish them collectively, or set any ground rules that apply specifically to their joint activities.

This obviously has negative externalities, because while a corporation is easy to fine, it's hard to put in prison... but trying to approach it differently would be about as fun as modeling a CPU as a bunch of transistors.

Re: Unexpected things that are people

#6

Post by Barbing »

>In 2017 the New Zealand Parliament passed the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act, which granted the Whanganui river a ‘legal personality’ and endowed it with “all the corresponding rights, duties, and liabilities of a legal person”.

Unexpected indeed, interesting!

Re: Unexpected things that are people

#7

Post by robot-wrangler »

Thought provoking. Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized. The thing with temples stems ultimately from fairly practical matters if they hold such treasure, but it's a magnet for strife, and actually kind of surprising that in the case-study mentioned they resisted the opportunity to justify abuse of power. What is a lawyer really but a kind of priest or magician, changing material reality with obscure incantations of dubious origin?

Historically and practically speaking, I get the impression that the boat stuff seems the least controversial and makes the most sense. Incoherent to want to sue a river for flooding, but if a boat crashes into your house for example, then you'd like to be able to at least seize the boat without enduring the back-and-forth deflection between owners and operators.

Re: Unexpected things that are people

#9

Post by jstanley »

robot-wrangler wrote: post #7

Thought provoking. Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized. The thing with temples stems ultimately from fairly practical matters if they hold such treasure, but it's a magnet for strife, and actually kind of surprising that in the case-study mentioned they resisted the opportunity to justify abuse of po…

> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized.

I would have thought that people who hate the idea of corporate personhood would also hate the idea of any other kind of non-person personhood.

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