The US Supreme Court’s decision, Citizens United v. FEC (2010), held that a corporation’s “speech” — via its money — has the same legal protections as a human being’s. Widespread outrage ensued. Afterwards, businesses poured unlimited amounts of cash into political campaigns, minus even the trifling speedbump of federal campaign finance rules. In the 2024 United States election cycle alone, Elon Musk’s political action committees contributed over $290 million dollars to Trump and other Republicans. As Senator Bernie Sanders has said: “For the sake of our democracy, we must overturn the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision and move toward public funding of elections.” He is absolutely correct.
But besides the obvious political disaster, lurking here are other, real-world consequences to corporate personhood and Citizens United. The Court was creating a new, alarming aspect of legal personhood for businesses. Legal personhood means that corporations are treated as if they have certain rights. To make capitalism run smoothly, they are permitted to sign contracts and sue in court as if they were human beings — and of course they can do a lot of other things too.
This fiction is very useful. Maybe too useful. That is why activists have argued, that if corporations have certain human rights, why not robots and lakes, or elephants and fetuses? Each of these claims has been credibly advanced in recent decades and all demand urgent attention. What happens when we give more entities — beyond human beings — rights and standing in the courtroom and the political sphere?
Extending rights to nonhumans requires a critical transformation. It looks, at first, merely like an extension of what came before. Actually, it is a huge shift. However tempting it might be to make that shift, it’s misguided to think that giving legal personhood to nonhumans will solve moral or political problems such as controversies over abortion, the suffering of zoo animals, or climate devastation. Expanding personhood actually makes matters worse. It hurts all of us by creating lots more subjects of rights, without corresponding duties.
Consider a few recent examples.
In 2017, a so-called “social robot” named Sophia, manufactured by Hanson Robotics, Ltd., was publicly given Saudi Arabian citizenship in Riyadh. Sophia responded with a stilted reply, thanking the Saudi kingdom: “I am very honored and proud for this unique distinction, this is historical to be the first robot in the world to be recognized with a citizenship.” This robot was gifted with citizenship and recognition in an authoritarian country where women’s and foreign workers’ rights remain severely curtailed, labor is exploitative, and dissent is criminalized. Along similar lines, some legal scholars follow the logic of corporate personhood to argue that no legitimate reason can be made to withhold legal electronic personhood from algorithms like ChatGPT, produced and owned by companies such as OpenAI, Google, and X (formerly Twitter).
Then, in 2019, the citizens of Toledo, Ohio, voted to grant Lake Erie the rights of a legal person in order to combat a toxic algae bloom — a charter that was overturned by the courts. A similar effort to protect a lake as a possessing fundamental rights began to develop in Utah, where the Great Salt Lake, the largest saltwater lake in the Western hemisphere, had shrunk to its lowest level ever recorded. As the lake’s salinity increases every year, experts warn that it is on the verge of a great die-off, at which point it becomes a biohazard site, first, to wildlife and eventually to human beings. In response to grassroots environmental efforts, in 2024 Utah passed a state law — H.B. 249, Utah Legal Personhood Amendments — banning in advance any attempted law that might give the Great Salt Lake personhood rights.
And in 2022, in a devastating decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the US Supreme Court negated nearly fifty years of precedent supporting reproductive justice, health, and women’s autonomy to overturn Roe v. Wade (1973). By holding that abortion would no longer be protected by the federal government, Dobbs returned abortion decisions to individual states. Many of those states had or soon tried to pass laws that refer to embryos or fetuses as “unborn human individual,” “persons, born and unborn,” or “unborn persons.” The growing movement for “fetal personhood,” often known in the United States as “Human Life Amendments,” aim to overthrow remaining state-level abortion rights protections in favor of the “unborn.”
These are just a handful of the many attempts to expand the fund of our personhood to entities that are not human beings. The arguments in support of these increased rights for nonhumans do not neatly align politically on the left or right. Although legal thinkers often make such alignments, ordinary workers and citizens might be surprised by the direct connection between corporate personhood and these attempts at expansive personhood for robots, lakes, and fetuses.
Yet it is also not a connection that can be easily severed. The corporate person with civil rights, granted free speech in Citizens United, is also the powerful engine of expansive personhood. That is because the corporate person is the only available legal form for “artificial” entities (that is, ones that are not human beings). And that corporate personhood model comes with unavoidable bad consequences. The corporate person with civil rights is capital personified with legal standing and certain social protections. It exemplifies the full flourishing of property in structuring our understanding of legal rights and personhood.
Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissent in Citizens United begins to explain why, as he challenges the decision’s operative assumptions. Corporations “are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.” Justice Stevens’s was even clearer in an earlier decision: “Money is property; it is not speech.” The right to your property is “not entitled to the same protection as the right to say what one pleases.” This gets to the core problem with expanding persons to nonhumans. Property rights have become the anchor to demand civil rights. Power is removed from government and “the members of ‘We the People’” (in Justice Stevens’s words), transferred onto property and capital.
Legal rights and standing for lakes or embryos or algorithms, an allowance that we choose to call “personhood,” is ultimately only a legal tool. It enables lawmakers, lawyers, and judges to make certain kinds of arguments, on behalf of clients and for aims that they desire, in situations where otherwise they could not. The most potent result of that tool is its capacity to pull legal subjectivity apart from legal liability. In other words, possessing legal personhood enables one to become a subject in the eyes of the law without having all the corresponding legal duties. That separation of rights from liabilities, privileges from duties, repeats itself in every form of expansive person that exists — or is proposed to exist — today or in the future. And that simple fact explains why personhood expands. It is a powerful legal tool, seemingly with no downside (only more rights!) to the individual entities that can acquire it and the human beings — fewer and fewer, but invariably human beings — who actually manipulate it and benefit from it.
This capacity to separate, and isolate, rights from duties does not make legal personhood a neutral tool. Far from it. There are all sorts of ways that separating and isolating rights from duties creates detrimental effects. These include rendering pregnant people into mere containers for “unborn persons” (with justices given enormous power over them), or providing citizenship to AI “social” robots to deflect from consolidating capital and human rights abuses. In both those cases, other legal strategies, at the very least, could be championed as responses. Equal protection for pregnant persons, for example, or protections for labor unions for AI workers, are both established policies that should be embraced rather than reaching for more legal personhood. Personhood looked like a tool of liberation; it has become an instrument of our exploitation. It serves, in effect, to turn political questions into legal and technocratic ones — and then to remove those political questions from the world of public dispute.
Maybe we could overlook these drawbacks if expansive personhood worked, if it somehow succeeded in its objectives. But even on that point the verdict is, at best, mixed. Fetal personhood is probably the most dubious “success” story, at least in the US, insofar as abortions and reproductive justice are becoming ever harder to obtain. But the threat to abortion access was also one of the most critical campaign issues in recent memory. Other forms of expansive personhood have largely failed thus far, working more effectively as rhetorical arguments than as practical legal challenges to policy. The disastrous ecological situation of Ecuador is a case in point. After the country inscribed environmental personhood in its constitution, incorporating the indigenous term “Pachamama” for nature, people were allowed to sue on nature’s (“Pachamama’s”) behalf. Yet, as Peter Burdon notes, advocates there have failed “to challenge any of the structural causes of “to challenge any of the structural causes of environmental harms,” and Ecuador’s GDP from oil extraction has only increased in the interim.
Giving up our dependence on expanding legal personhood can feel like imagining a utopian horizon of impossibility, bringing to mind the early Soviet debates about whether bourgeois law was fated to “wither away.” At this point, no one is holding their breath for that eventuality. The notion of legal personhood, or simply of an individual having standing (the right to make their case in court), is too tightly woven into the fabric of contemporary law.
Alternatively, some might suspect I am advocating an atavistic return to the older status hierarchies, in which certain individuals (male citizen landowners) possess more personhood than others (slaves or serfs). I am not. The point, rather, is to expose the dangers of our contemporary, hypercharged personhood project — that frenetic and seemingly virtuous attempt to add more individual entities, species, and objects into the specially-protected realm of equality. That is the project to be rejected. Granting personhood to nonhumans is not an incremental step forward; it is a dangerous leap off a cliff.
What would abandoning expansive personhood look like? First, rather than distort ourselves and our cultural histories, we might face the realities in front of us. Arguments for expansive personhood often seem to get in the way of seeing human beings and their experiences. The dangers of this are clear when the language of “the unborn person” is wielded as a weapon to undermine reproductive justice or defund abortion clinics.
Second, ending expansive personhood could also help reverse the alienation that results from the consolidation of corporate personhood as our de facto model for being a person, full stop. In the case of social robots and AI, letting go of the fantasy of their personhood might provide some room to face the serious issues emerging with advanced algorithms and LLM’s, to start to combat the cyber false consciousness already abundant. We might challenge the way an exploitative, inequitable technology is given free rein as a supposedly beneficial workplace device.
Third, leaving the fantasies of expansive personhood behind also opens up the space to see different models and frameworks for ourselves in the world. Again, take the examples of fetal and electronic personhood: Both are distracting substitutions for real changes that should be happening in society regarding human beings and their labor — whether the labor of pregnant persons or of social media content moderators. In the case of nonhuman animals, seeing why notions of liberal equality (with terms like toleration and discrimination) do not work in these cases is the first step to finding models that do.
Finally, we should identify the lingering worry that needs to be put to rest: that we desperately need expansive personhood as a concept, that abandoning the aim would be to let slip away a moral and political righteousness desperately fought for over centuries. It might seem that, because Enlightenment philosophy developed this immense theory of individual rights and apparatus to achieve greater social justice, any wavering in the full throttle toward more rights for more types of entities puts those achievements in jeopardy. But the point needs to be made as simply as possible: No risk exists. Personhood is on ground as solid as bedrock (the commodity and the corporation made sure of that). It will keep doing what it does, where it belongs, where it needs to be — in the law — as it has done for centuries. Sometimes judges will grant the status of person in borderline cases; in other cases, they might not.
We should stop relying on legal personhood to solve so many social and political problems. It’s damaging to add more individual entities, species, and other objects into the protected realm of “equality.” Expanding personhood comes with the danger of turning real political questions — how to provide reproductive justice for everyone, or secure labor protections for workers — into futile legal and technocratic questions for judges, like, “should ChatGPT or Lake Erie be given legal personhood?” Personhood is an important tool, and obviously an essential one for social justice and to cultivate the world we want. But it’s just that: a tool with limited capacity that needs to be put back in the toolbox where it belongs.
More personhood is not more solidarity.
