Reception with light refreshments starts at 5:15pm. Siraganian's talk starts at 5:30pm. Copies of the book will be sold at the event.
SHOULD NONHUMANS HAVE RIGHTS IN LAW AND POLITICS?
Over the last twenty-five years, the concept of per-sonhood has become central to many contentious debates. Corporations have won free speech protections, as if they were individuals. The right to life or freedom has been claimed on behalf of fetuses, trees, and elephants. The fund of human rights is spilling over into the nonhuman.
The Problem of Personhood reveals the unsettling consequences of granting rights to imagined persons, such as Sophia the robot citizen or New Zealand's Whanganui River. Synthesizing the political and phil颅osophical debates on personhood and drawing on a varied cast of thinkers that includes Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Dr. Seuss, Lisa Siraganian un颅covers the disturbing impact of this contemporary development. Awarding rights to robots and rivers all too easily becomes a legal tool to turn people into capital. When robot Sophia is made a citizen, "she" is transformed into a subject in the law without the corre颅sponding legal duties that protect us from her.
At the root of this trend is the US Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling that grants First Amendment rights to corporations as if they were individuals. The result has not been the transformation of things into humans so much as humans into things, when animals and the environment would be better protected with reference to our humanity rather than to theirs.
- 色戒直播 Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute (DHRC@FHI)