Pros & Cons of Corporate Personhood for Transbemans
Martine Rothblatt, Ph.D.
Page 3 of 4
How about from an evolving society standpoint? I think an advantage of corporate personhood for transbemans is that it encourages consciousness extensions. We would be openly admitting that consciousness can take other forms and we are going to regularize their lives with corporate personhood. I think beginning to allow consciousness to take other forms is a good thing for an evolving society to think about doing. BINA48 will likely not be subject to the H5N1 flu virus [1] or other terrible viruses. So it’s another way for humanity and human culture to continue to survive in a changing environment.
A disadvantage might be that corporate personhood for BINA48 could undermine the tried and true DNA based life and maybe encouraging artificial consciousness is not something that will help the species survive in the long run. None of us are really smart enough to know. Darwin always preached: "Evolution is not about building smarter and smarter animals. It's about building more and more diverse types of life, and some of these diverse types of life thrive when the environment changes."
How about the transbeman's view? What are the pros and cons of corporate personhood from the transbeman's view? I think from the transbeman's view they would look at it as second-class citizenship. It would mean that they were, in general, not safe and less happy.
Throughout society when there are second-class citizens they are generally subject to oppression, subject to violence, not happy, and not safe. They get lynched, they get deported, they get thrown into concentration camps. I think corporate personhood from a transbeman point of view would not be the best of all possible worlds. We have a kind of ethical conundrum here. David Koepsell [2], Max More, and Sebastian Sethe have identified several great philosophical trends and one of them is the notion that we award rights to those who value them. One can find elements of that in Kant [3] and find a lot more elements of that in Rawls [4] and the contractarian approach. It's all about people getting what they value because that is what they would negotiate for on an open and clear basis. Transbemans that think like us – and our experts told us that BINA48 thought like us; they couldn't really differentiate her from us -- will value human rights like us. Certainly everything in the evidentiary record that we've seen about BINA48 shows that she values the same rights that we value. Ergo, those who value rights as humans do ethically deserve the same constitutional personhood that humans have. Ethically, one is really drawn to this conclusion.
I would like to suggest a new approach to personhood which is basically Turing [5] meets Freud meets Christine Jorgensen. Christine Jorgensen was a person that shell-shocked the world right about the time frame that Turing was suggesting that a way to tell whether or not a computer was a person was to play a parlor game in guessing the computer's sex through teletype messages.
Christine Jorgensen around that time astonished the world by actually changing her sex from male to female. She was previously a U.S. serviceman and then went to Denmark to get a sex change. Many thousands of people have followed in her shoes. How does the law deal with somebody that was legally branded female at birth and wanted to be male or branded male at birth and wanted to be female? It's really not so different from the concept of somebody who is a transbeman and wants to have the rights of a human. It's the same type of problem. What ended up evolving through the legal system and through the court system, in a somewhat ad hoc manner, was what was called the one-year, real-life test. If an individual wants to legally change their sex from male to female or female to male they have to spend a year meeting with two separate psychiatrists who are trained in the field of gender identity. After one year of these sessions the two psychologists or psychiatrists write a letter to an authority, it could be -- depending on where the transsexual wants to go -- a judge, which is usually who the letters are written to, or the State Department or the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the birth certificate registrar.
The letters say that this individual has persuaded us over a course of a year in fifty sessions that they are really a female and not a male, kindly: change their driving license to female; change their birth certificate to female; change their genitals to female; or visa versa.
This approach has great attraction for at least the early years of transbemanhood in which a judge would order a birth certificate based on a year worth of interviews with a transbeman. During that year the two psychiatrists trained in cyber psychology -- which I think will be one of the most important fields in the future -- decide whether or not this transbeman truly values human rights or not. If the transbeman truly values human rights after a year of these sessions then the transbeman could acquire naturally born citizenship, and would be given a birth certificate. Basically, the concept here is that there are two ways forward for transbeman personhood. Start the transbeman with corporate personhood unless they already have constitutional personhood. All of us in this room are transbemans but we don't have to worry, we already have constitutional personhood. We are like the people that got here before everyone was against the immigrants getting here, so we’re okay.
After corporate personhood, part two is to use the real-life test route for issuance of birth certificates or equivalents for transbemans that desire constitutional personhood. It may be that many transbemans are entirely happy with corporate personhood. Just like in the film Starship Troopers [6] there are many people in that day and age who didn't really want the right to vote and all of the obligation for military service and whatnot that went with full citizenship. There may be transbemans that are happy with corporate personhood. However, as has been pointed out by Bill Bainbridge [7], obligations are the flip side of every right. The more rights you have, the more obligations you have. The real-life test could be a route that would allow transbemans that desire constitutional personhood to obtain it.
Footnotes
1. H5N1 influenza virus - Avian influenza - the "bird flu" - is a virus that infects wild birds (e.g., ducks and gulls) and domestic poultry (e.g., chickens and turkeys). There are numerous different strains of avian influenza; however, most do not cause illness in people. Only influenza A viruses naturally infect birds. The H5N1 strain can infect birds, other animals and people.
http://www.fda.gov/Cber/... October 8, 2008 2:03PM EST
2. David R. Koepsell, J.D., Ph.D. - an author, philosopher, and attorney whose recent research focuses on the nexus of science, technology, ethics and public policy.
http://www.geocities.com/drkoepsell/ October 8, 2008 2:09PM EST
3. Immanuel Kant - one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/k/kantmeta.htm October 8, 2008 2:12PM EST
4. John Rawls - arguably the most important political philosopher of the 20th century. He wrote a series of highly influential articles in the 1950s and ’60s that helped refocus Anglo-American moral and political philosophy on substantive problems about what we ought to do.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/r/rawls.htm October 8, 2008 2:13PM EST
5. Alan Mathison Turing - British mathematician and logician, who made major contributions to mathematics, cryptanalysis, logic, philosophy, and biology and to the new areas later named computer science, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and artificial life.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/... October 8, 2008 2:35PM EST
6. Starship Troopers - In the distant future high school kids are encouraged to become citizens by joining the military. What they don't know is that they'll soon be engaged in a full scale war against a planet of alien insects. The fight is on to ensure the safety of humanity. Written by Christopher Van Pelt.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/plotsummary October 8, 2008 2:42PM EST
7. William Sims Bainbridge, Ph.D. - a prolific and influential sociologist of religion, science and popular culture. Dr. Bainbridge serves as co-director of Human-Centered Computing at the NSF and has recently taught sociology and computational social science at George Mason University.
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/bio/bainbridge/ October 8, 2008 2:56PM EST
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