Humanhood. The Humanising Functions of Legal Personhood in a Posthuman Age

Amsterdam Centre for Transformative Private Law

Interfacing Private Law lecture series with Britta van Beers (VU).

About the speaker Britta van Beers is professor of law, ethics, and biotechnology at the department of legal theory and legal history at the Vrije University. She is the Director of the Faculty of Law's Graduate School. In her research she explores the legal-philosophical dimensions of the regulation and governance of biomedical technologies. She graduated in law and philosophy (cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam and studied at New York University School of Law. After graduation she worked and studied in Tokyo as part of a 1-year post-graduate programme of Japanese language and culture, organised by the University of Leiden. In 2002 she started as a PhD candidate at the VU law faculty. She was a visiting scholar at the Parisian universities Panthéon-Sorbonne and EHESS in 2005. In December 2019 she was appointed as full professor on the VU <a href="https://vu.nl/nl/nieuws/2019/britta-van-beers-benoemd-tot-urc-hoogleraar" title="https://vu.nl/nl/nieuws/2019/britta-van-beers-benoemd-tot-urc-hoogleraar" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">University Research Chair</a>. In 2022-2023 she was appointed on a Francqui chair at the Faculty of Law of the University of Antwerp to teach and do research about the legal distinction between persons and things.Abstract In this presentation, Van Beers addresses the humanising functions of legal personhood in an age in which the person-thing distinction is increasingly regarded as a harmful fiction, at odds with the embedded, physical, interdependent and relational aspects of life. Throughout its history, from Roman law to human rights law, the legal concept of the person has gone through alternating waves of artificialisation and naturalisation. Each of these waves has left its marks on the legal person. Nevertheless, whether one is inclined to regard legal personhood as a purely legal-technical construct, as artificialists would argue, or rather as a legal reflection of flesh-and-blood human beings, as naturalists or realists would have it, there appears to be general agreement that recognition as a legal person has humanising effects, and that, vice versa, denial of personhood has dehumanising effects. In Hannah Arendt’ striking words in The origins of totalitarianism: ‘the first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man’. She therefore makes the case for a ‘right to have rights’, that is, a right ‘to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions’. This right to have rights has found its way to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which recognises ‘the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law’ in Article 6. Evidently, this human right can be understood as a legal reaction to the systematic legal depersonalisation of individuals under the regime of the Third Reich.However, legal personhood can also be said to have humanising functions outside the exceptional context of totalitarianism. In this vein, understandings of personhood and human dignity are at the basis of current legal bans on various technology-driven forms of commercialisation, commodification and objectification of human life. Examples include legal bans on human organ trafficking, on human cloning, and on certain forms of mind-control, which all go back to a normative understanding of the person-thing distinction.Yet the legal person-thing distinction is under increasing pressure from several interconnected approaches such as posthumanism, critical legal theory and new materialism. According to these critiques, the person-thing distinction is the product of a distortive anthropocentric mythology which is at the root of many crises that we are currently facing, including the climate crisis, and should, therefore, be dismantled and replaced by a new conceptual framework in which ‘the web of life’ and network of relations between ‘entities’ take front stage.In her talk, Van Beers discusses these critiques of legal personhood. Unlike posthumanist thinkers, she argues that a certain degree of legal anthropocentrism is both inevitable and indispensable in the light of the humanising functions of legal personhood. At the same time, posthumanist critiques lay bare several shortcomings of current concepts of legal personhood. In the remainder of her presentation, she explores the possibility of a legal-philosophical anthropology that can protect humans against commodification and objectification and do justice to the concerns of posthumanist thinkers. She refers to this concept of personhood as humanhood.

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Humanhood. The Humanising Functions of Legal Personhood in a Posthuman Age

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