Volume 1, Issue 1
1st Quarter, 2006


Forms of Transhuman Persons and the Importance of Prior Resolution of Relevant Law

Martine Rothblatt, J.D., Ph.D.

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The colloquia also concluded that a designated entity had to be legally responsible for every object launched into outer space. They realized that these objects could cause damage and if nobody was responsible and there was no rule of law, conflict and possibly even war might result.

So how do they fare? Image 6 contains pictures of two of the founding members of the Colloquia on the Law of Outer Space - Andrew Haley from Washington D.C. and Stephen Gorove from the University of Mississippi.

Founding MembersImage 6

Nine years after they began, they had an international treaty that banned sovereignty over space. Six years later, an international treaty on liability caused by space objects was adopted worldwide. These treaties were based on the findings and developments that came out of each yearly meeting of the colloquia. Each year, the colloquia would develop and draft treaties, and papers would be presented on the pros and cons of different propositions. Last year, in 2005, the Colloquia on the Law of Outer Space held its 47th meeting. It has never missed a year since 1958.

Thus, the Colloquia on the Law of Outer Space is certainly a great role model for those of us working on the Law of Transhuman Persons. What might we conclude analogous to our legal forbearers? Perhaps transhumanist technology renders age-old concepts of citizenship and death as obsolete as the age-old legal concept of national sovereignty. We will have to come up with new concepts to transcend death or citizenship because of our own “Sputnik-izing” of technology in our own time. And perhaps we will agree that responsibility for transhuman persons needs to be regularized in some fashion so that newly created individuals have a train of responsibility whether to themselves or the non-transhuman people who created them.

A possible analytic framework for a transhuman person law is laid out in Image 7.Analytic FrameworkImage 7

We may need to evolve to an information theory definition of death instead of heart death or brain death, which have been the prevailing definitions. If an individual’s mind information is still organized, we have to ask if they are really dead under our concept of information theory death.

We then must question whether that entity is conscious. Consciousness is a complex subject. My favorite definition of consciousness is borrowed from Justice Potter Steward’s definition of pornography - that he can’t define it, but he knows it when he sees it. When he said he knew it when he saw it, he said finally that we will have to revert to community standards of what pornography is to a particular community. Perhaps we will need community standards with regard to whether or not an entity is consciousness.

Finally, if an entity is not dead and they are conscious, what type of legal rights do they have? Does the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution apply so that they have the same rights as people who have been biologically born in the United States?

We have a number of years to explore these decisions. We certainly don’t have to solve them at the first colloquia. But if we could accomplish what the first Colloquia on the Law of Outer Space did - create an agenda of legal issues to be addressed - we will be on a good track. Finally, if we do agree that transhuman individuals should be granted transhuman citizenship, it would certainly be a huge leap to grant citizenship based on an individual’s desire for citizenship, human rights, and organization of mind information rather than based on a genome or a phenotype.

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