Research Questions

Questions collected from the group, gathered from the call thread for the 3 September 2026 session and the days following. Grouped by theme; closely related questions sit together rather than being merged, so the different framings stay visible.

Definition and boundaries

• Is personhood a boundary object — and if so, does the existence of boundaries bring persons into being?
• Where are the boundary conditions of personhood, and how might Margaret Radin's Property and Personhood (1982) be updated for the present?
• What role does unknowability play in personhood? What do attempts to predict or pregenerate persons mean for their personhood?
• Are adversarial doubles and monsters a category crisis that produces a new type of person?
• What do non-Western and perspectivist frameworks offer that liberal legal framings of personhood do not?

Rights, autonomy, and responsibility

• What is the connection between personhood and rights, and what are the minimum rights a person must have as a consequence of personhood?
• What level of autonomy do persons have, and how does it differ from the autonomy of non-persons?
• What is the relationship between personhood and rights (autonomy, the positive ability to do things) versus personhood and moral responsibility (freedom from harm and interference, moral consideration from others)?
• How are concepts of personhood used to strip rights rather than extend them — fetal personhood being the obvious case?

Law, precedent, and political pathways

• What are the legal and political pathways towards recognition of personhood?
• Why has personhood for rivers, trees, and animals remained a side show in common law? The history seems marginal, without much precedent that would crystallize personhood for nature or animals.
• Does the requirement that someone else bring a legal claim on behalf of these entities — for which legal standing has no intrinsic meaning — stretch personhood past the point of usefulness?
• How did tort law change the way corporations came to hold personhood, and what does that suggest for other candidates?

Nature and non-human entities

• Could a hyperobject like climate have personhood?
• If a forest, a mountain, or a deer has personhood, how can we know what it communicates?
• Can humans, or a computer intelligence, act as agent for a natural entity treated as a person?
• Can a natural entity have conflicting interests within itself? (Addictive behaviours in humans might suggest yes.)

Collectives

• Can a collective of intelligences be considered a person — a hive mind, a colony? What explorations of this already exist?
• Corporations already fit this description; what does that precedent imply for other collectives?
• What of collectives with cognition and intelligence but no apparent sentience, consciousness, or experience?

Formation and potential

• What happens to human potential when the conditions surrounding a person systematically shape what they are able to become? (Asked from a phenomenological standpoint.)

Digital conditions, trust, and proof

• How do technology and social media erode trust, and what does that erosion do to personhood?
• What happens to personhood when working "online" is no longer separable from the labour market — when the space of social life and the space of labour are the same?
• Establishing that something has personhood is one problem; proving you are that thing in a digital context is another, and getting harder. What does the difficulty of proving it do to persons?
• Proof-of-personhood systems give people economic incentives to periodically differentiate themselves from bots. What does that incentive do to the people inside them?

Artificial intelligence

• Is legal personhood for AI agents presumptively desirable?
• Who would benefit from an AI personhood protocol?
• How does AI run through all of the above — as a source of distrust, as a participant in online labour, and as the reason proof of personhood is suddenly needed?
• Can values emerge from repeated iteration against an objective or benchmark on the part of AI models, and would that constitute the volition — preferences and values animating intent — that one construction of personhood requires?

Fictive personhood

• What are the overlaps between character and personhood?
• Can anything fully fictional become a person? If so, in what sense, and what does that mean for them?