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The Rights of Nature movement uses a bold tactic to preserve our habitable Earth: it seeks to extend (pseudo) personhood to things like watersheds, forests and other ecosystems, as well as nonhuman species, in hopes of creating legal "standing" to ask the courts for protection:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_nature
What do watersheds, forests and nonhuman species need protection from? That turns out to be a very interesting question, because the most common adversary in a Rights of Nature case is another pseudo-person: namely, a limited liability corporation.
These nonhuman "persons" have been a feature of our legal system since the late 19th century, when the Supreme Court found that the 14th Amendment's "Equal Protection" clause could be applied to a railroad. In the 150-some years since, corporate personhood has monotonically expanded, most notoriously through cases like Hobby Lobby, which gave a corporation the right to discriminate against women on the grounds that it shared its founders' religious opposition to abortion; and, of course, in Citizens United, which found that corporate personhood meant that corporations had a constitutional right to divert their profits to bribe politicians.
Theoretically, "corporate personhood" extends to all kinds of organizations, including trade unions – but in practice, corporate personhood primarily allows the ruling class to manufacture new "people" to serve as a botnet on their behalf. A union has free speech rights just like an employer, but the employer's property rights mean that it can exclude union organizers from its premises, and employer rights mean that corporations can force workers to sit through "captive audience" meetings where expensive consultants lie to them about how awful a union would be (the corporation's speech rights also mean that it's free to lie).
In my view, corporate personhood has been an unmitigated disaster. Creating "human rights" for these nonhuman entities led to the catastrophic degradation of the natural world, via the equally catastrophic degradation of our political processes.
In a strange way, corporate personhood has realized the danger that reactionary opponents of votes for women warned of. In the days of the suffrage movement, anti-feminists claimed that giving women the vote would simply lead to husbands getting two votes, since wives would simply vote the way their husbands told them to.
This libel never died out. Take the recent hard-fought UK by-election in Gorton and Denton (basically Manchester): this was the first test of the Green Party's electoral chances under its new leader, the brilliant and principled leftist Zack Polanski. The Green candidate was Hannah Spencer, a working-class plumber and plasterer who rejected the demonization of the region's Muslim voters, unlike her rivals from Labour (which has transformed itself into a right-wing party), Reform (a fascist party), and the Conservatives (an irrelevant and dying right party). During the race (and especially after Spencer romped to a massive victory) Spencer's rivals accused her of courting "family voters," by which they meant Muslim wives, who would vote the way their Islamist husbands ordered them to. Despite the facial absurdity of this claim – that the Islamist vote would go for the pro-trans party led by a gay Jew – it was widely repeated:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyxeqpzz2no
"Family voting" isn't a thing, but corporate personhood has conferred political rights on the ruling class, who get to manufacture corporate "people" at scale, each of which is guaranteed the same right to contribute to politicians and intervene in our politics as any human.
Contrast this with the Rights for Nature movement. Where corporate personhood leads to a society with less empathy for living things (up to and including humans), Rights for Nature creates a legal and social basis for more empathy. In her stunning novel A Half-Built Garden, Ruthanna Emrys paints a picture of a world in which the personhood of watersheds and animals become as much of a part of our worldview as corporate personhood is today:
Scenes from A Half-Built Garden kept playing out in my mind last month while I attended the Bioneers conference in Berkeley, where they carried on their decades-long tradition of centering indigenous activists whose environmental campaigns were intimately bound up with the idea of personhood for the natural world and its inhabitants:
https://bioneers.org/
On the last morning, my daughter and I sat through a string of inspiring and uplifting presentations from indigenous-led groups that had used Rights of Nature to rally support for legal challenges that had forced those other nonhuman "persons" – limited liability corporations – to retreat from plans to raze, poison, or murder whole regions.
The final keynote speaker that morning was the writer Michael Pollan, who spoke about a looming polycrisis of AI, and I found myself groaning and squirming. Not him, too! Were we about to be held captive to yet another speaker convinced that AI was going to become conscious and turn us all into paperclips?
That seemed to be where he was leading, as he discussed the way that chatbots were designed to evince the empathic response we normally reserve for people – the same empathy that all the other speakers were seeking to inspire for nature. But then, he took an unexpected and welcome turn: Pollan compared extending personhood to chatbots to the disastrous decision to extend personhood to corporations, and urged us all to turn away from it.
This crystallized something that had niggled at me for years. For years, people I respect have used the Rights for Nature movement as an argument for extending empathy to software constructs. The more we practice empathy – and the more rights we afford to more entities – the better we get at it. Personhood for things that are not like us, the argument goes, makes our own personhood more secure, by honing a reflex toward empathy and respect for all things. This is the argument for saying thank you to Siri (and now to other chatbots):
Siri – like so many of our obedient, subservient, sycophantic chatbots – impersonates a woman. If we get habituated to barking orders at a "woman" (or at our "assistants") then this will bleed out into our interactions with real women and real assistants. Extending moral consideration to Siri, though "she" is just a software construct, will condition our reflexes to treat everything with respect.
For years, I'd uncritically accepted that argument, but after hearing Pollan speak, I changed my mind. Rather than treating Siri with respect because it impersonates a woman, we should demand that Siri stop impersonating a woman. I don't thank my Unix shell when I pipe a command to grep and get the output that I'm looking for, and I don't thank my pocket-knife when it slices through the tape on a parcel. I can appreciate that these are well-made tools and value their thoughtful design, but that doesn't mean I have to respect them in the way that I would respect a person.
That way lies madness – the madness that leads us to ascribe personalities to corporations and declare some of them to be "immoral" and others to be "moral," which is always and forever a dead end:
In other words: there's an argument from the Rights of Nature movement that says that the more empathy we practice, the better off we are in all our interactions. But Pollan complicated that argument, by raising the example of corporate personhood. It turns out that extending personhood to constructed nonhuman entities like corporations reduces the amount of empathy we practice. Far from empowering labor unions, the creation of "human" rights for groups and organizations has given capital more rights over workers. A labor rights regime can defend workers – without empowering bosses and without creating new "persons."
The question is: is a chatbot more like a corporation (whose personhood corrodes our empathy) or more like a watershed (whose personhood strengthens our empathy)? But to ask that question is to answer it – a chatbot is definitely more like a corporation than it is like a watershed. What's more: in a very real, non-metaphorical way, giving rights to chatbots means taking away rights from nature, thanks to LLMs' energy-intesivity.
Empathy then, for the nonhuman world – but not for human constructs.
I do thank my tools for their service, but I see tools as very different things from the mental construct of a company. (And I feel like we should be spending the extra syllables to say "the owner of CompanyName" instead of "CompanyName" and also ask who that is or who they are, when it comes to c suite and boards.)
I agree! I've been reading the book Enshittification (by OP/prev), and one of the most refreshing and inspiring aspects of it is the insistence to acknowledge that when a corporation does something it wasn't "the corporation" that did it. Individual people with names and addresses chose to do it, and they shouldn't get to hide behind the curtain of corporate personhood. Or as he so eloquently puts it:
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