ABSTRACT
Assessing whether or not robots might be eligible for rights requires unpacking and connecting concepts pertinent to the determination of rights. This chapter attempts to accomplish this task by advancing two arguments. First, the debate over the machine question and the discussion of rights for nonhuman entities more generally has suffered from terminological inconsistency and the application of different standards. Second, returning to Hume for a moment, the is/ought problem sets up a false dichotomy between the properties and relational responses to the machine question. The chapter proceeds by distinguishing between and exploring the relationships among different types of personhood, drawing together personhoods and statuses, explaining how statuses translate into incidents, and finally arriving at theories underpinning the extension of rights. It maps the muddled terrain of personhoods in the service of clarifying how the concept relates to the different kinds of rights at issue in philosophical and legal scholarship on intelligent machines.
