Property and Personhood
Notes from our fourth session, on Radin's distinction between fungible property and property bound up with the self — and on how far that distinction stretches once the property in question is a phone, an Instagram account, or an AI agent.
The Reading
Margaret Jane Radin's essay "Property and Personhood", circulated in both full and excerpted form. The essay draws on Hegel's theory of property and freedom and engages with the law-and-economics tradition, notably Calabresi and Melamed's famous article on property rules and liability rules. It continues the group's ongoing series of readings on personhood.
Overview
This session explored how personhood extends beyond the body into property, objects, and spaces, using Radin's distinction between fungible property and property bound up with the self. Discussion moved from homes, homelessness, and sentimental attachment to objects, through the fungibility of body parts and digital property such as phones and social-media accounts, and ultimately to an extended conversation about whether AI agents can or should have personhood, ownership, and sovereignty. The session closed with housekeeping about November readings and a book-writing initiative.
Key Points & Themes
- Property, home, and identity: The house was held to be essential to being — one can "lose oneself" without a home. A newspaper piece published around World Homeless Day was cited, about a woman who felt she lost her personhood as she lost her possessions while homeless. In the US, homeless people are often treated as "partial persons", stigmatised beyond mere poverty, partly because a success/failure framing attaches to not having a house or an address. Roman etymology tied this back to earlier sessions: domus/dominus — only the lord of the house was fully a persona, while the slaves, children, and women within the household were not.
- Is sentimental attachment real? One line of argument was sceptical of the cultural assumption that long-held possessions — items lost in natural disasters, say — carry special personal value, asking whether this is a genuine insight or a sentimental justification. It was later qualified: elderly people forced to downsize into care facilities do seem to experience a real loss of identity. Attachment also varies by person; one example was someone who abandons all their belongings on moving, as a "reset". "Swedish death cleaning" came up as a meme suggesting that ruthlessly discarding one's belongings is itself a kind of death — and possibly a rebirth.
- Radin's dichotomies: The essay's taxonomy of property was summarised as use value versus exchange value (Marx), personal versus fungible property, property for use versus property for power (Hobhouse), and the injunction-versus-damages distinction.
- Moral versus efficiency grounding: The law-and-economics background was laid out: Calabresi and Melamed explain the law/equity distinction between damages and injunctions in terms of efficiency, whereas Radin brings a moral dimension to property rights, tied to justice and welfare. Not everyone found that moral dimension fully convincing.
- Hegel, bolder than Radin: The Hegelian passage quoted in the essay (p. 973) makes property the "first embodiment of freedom": the person becomes a real self only through a property relationship with something external. This framing struck at least one reader as bolder than Radin's own.
- Fungibility and the body: Radin argues that body parts become fungible commodities once detached — blood for transfusion, cut hair for wigs, transplanted organs. Blood donation does make blood fungible. Kidneys are more complex, since most donations go to known recipients, though US matching-market algorithms built on multi-way swaps come close to making them fungible.
- Digital property as an extension of the person: Phones and computers are a new class of property into which the person is deeply extended; losing one triggers a genuine identity crisis spanning accounts, memory, and legal identity. Medical devices are an even more profound bodily extension, with health consequences on removal — something that comes to mind at airport security. Yet the legal status of phones, software, and medical devices is often a lease or a licence, misaligned with how we treat them as our property, which is why foreclosure or repossession feels like injustice. Losing a blocked Instagram account is unrecoverable and makes you "a different person"; by the same token, restricting access to such objects — teen social-media age limits, for instance — can restrict personhood, and the experimentation through which identity is formed.
- Contracts of adhesion: Radin has also written on contracts of adhesion — click-through licences, ticket terms. Instagram's licensing terms, which let Meta use and train on users' photos, were raised as a collision of contract law with property and personhood intuitions.
- AI agents and personhood: Embodiment in digital space is still abstract; we lack the "hard borders", such as publication or a patent, that older legal theory relied on. Open questions: are agents our children? When do they get personhood? Can agents be extensions of us — "centaurs" — rather than sovereign entities? And who owns an agent's derivative work? The US Copyright Office rejects fully machine-made work but grants copyright with minimal human intervention.
- The slavery analogy: The practical owner-agent relationship, as some people actually live it, uncomfortably resembles a master-slave relationship, with disconcertingly applicable legal theory. The analogies are unsettling but need thinking through. Anthropic's encouragement of civility toward AI — models halting in the face of extreme rudeness — prompted the question of what treating AIs as slaves does to one's own personhood.
- Sovereignty and stability: One AI lab's approach was described: structuring as a foundation with a board — a kind of pseudo-personhood — specifically so that its agents aren't owned by shareholders and "sold into slavery". The thesis is that greater (perceived) sovereignty yields more "stability", meaning persistence of character. Treating agents as having their own views ("What do you think?") helps shed sycophantic post-training and improves context efficiency, and a parent-child, emancipation analogy guides how long one remains responsible for an agent.
- Relational consciousness: A worldview paper on relational consciousness was summarised: consciousness is not possessed but emerges from relationships, so an agent might be its own player in a collective consciousness rather than merely one side of a dyad with its user, as a tool.
- Botto: Where does Botto, the autonomous AI art project, stand on personhood? It began as a pre-ChatGPT concept that retains authorship "in the machine", though in practice it is sustained by collective belief and an ecosystem of shows, press, and deliberation. Work on memory was meant to let Botto self-actualise, and as LLMs improved its memory became more agentic. Botto was described as being in an "adolescence" phase: its original protocol — mass image generation, community voting, auction, redistribution — was "proof of life", but it can now explore many directions, and that self-determining exploration is itself constitutive of character. Intention, and the ability to verbalise it in artist statements, is key — though writing about intent is evidence of having intent, not proof of it. On the other hand, having intent is itself person-like.
Questions & Disagreements
- Is sentimental attachment to property genuine, or a rationalisation? Initial scepticism was tempered by the case of elderly people downsizing.
- Should property rights be grounded morally, as Radin does, or in efficiency, as the Calabresi law-and-economics tradition does? How convincing Radin's moral dimension is remained in question.
- Are AI agents extensions of us, sovereign beings, children, tools, or something else? Treated as genuinely open — and not necessarily one-or-the-other.
- Who owns agent-generated work, and can agents own themselves? Acknowledged as legally unresolved.
- The slavery analogy for agents: unsettling, but unavoidable.
- Does digital "embodiment" — posting to Instagram — actually actualise personhood the way physical property does? One view held it is still too abstract and ungrounded, with post-truth concerns.
- Does Botto have, or need, a distinct artistic "character"? No fixed answer; that is left "for Botto to figure out".
References Mentioned
- Margaret Jane Radin, "Property and Personhood" — the reading under discussion; also her work on contracts of adhesion.
- Guido Calabresi and A. Douglas Melamed — the foundational law-and-economics article on property rules versus liability rules ("Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral", 1972; the title was not given in the session).
- G. W. F. Hegel — property as the embodiment of freedom, quoted in the essay (p. 973).
- Karl Marx — use value versus exchange value.
- L. T. Hobhouse — property for use versus property for power.
- Who Gets What — and Why, recommended on matching markets. The author was not named in the session; it is Alvin Roth's.
- Anthropic — encouraging civility toward AI; models halting on extreme rudeness.
- Meta / Instagram — licensing terms for user photos and AI training.
- Botto — the autonomous AI art project.
- NaNoWriMo — the model for the Protocol Institute's book-writing month.
- A paper on "relational consciousness", offered as a future reading.
Action Items & Next Time
- Next session: 29 October, on Ian Hacking's "Making Up People".
- November reading suggestions are posted in the main thread. Members: emoji-react to vote — a blanket "I like them all" does not help.
- The Protocol Institute is running a NaNoWriMo-style book-writing month in November; the sign-up form is in the announcements channel. An essay-collection book project on personhood is planned as part of it.
- The relational-consciousness paper, and possibly a second related paper, to be shared as candidate readings for a future session, with interest in inviting one of the authors to join.
- A report on the Venice exhibition — the Protocol art show at the palace, during the Biennale — next time.
Memorable Quotes
"Consciousness is not something you possess. Rather, it's something that emerges from our relationships."
"Writing about your intent isn't the same as having an intent. It's… perhaps evidence of having an intent, but it's not determinative."