takomabibelot/Flickr. Creative Commons.
To speak in the same breath of personhood and political economy sounds odd because of the seemingly obvious radical difference between the two worlds of their application. On the one hand, a straightforward moral term from everyday life referring to the status of our fellow humans; on the other hand, a technical theory with roots in 18th-century French and British philosophical thought about the interrelation between economic production, society, and the state. What could these two possibly have to do with each other?
Let’s start with personhood, a term far less straightforward than it seems. To begin with, we can’t use person and human interchangeably because, as science fiction reminds us, when the aliens do eventually arrive they will presumably expect to be treated with the respect due to self-legislating beings. Personhood is a moral status that is not limited to humans. For that matter, right here on our own planet, some animal rights advocates would want to extend it to great apes, or even more broadly. Nor is a biological incarnation necessarily even a prerequisite. Recent exponential advances in AI technology open up the future possibility of self-conscious computers and robots whose potential moral rights as self-aware entities have likewise long been a staple of science fiction. Personhood is a moral status that is not limited to organic life. Indeed, in a legal sense (if admittedly more fuzzily in a moral sense), personhood is independent of such considerations, as demonstrated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1886 decision to recognize corporations as persons under the Fourteenth Amendment and their more recent 2010 Citizens United decision removing, under the First Amendment, limits to corporate political spending. “Person,” as John Locke pointed out long ago, “is a forensic term,” though even he did not realize how liberated from the biological it would eventually come to be.
