This chapter comprehensively lays out all the possible ways that artificial intelligence (AI) might interact with Jewish sources as their relationship develops over the next many years. It divides the scope of the relationship into three parts. First, it engages with questions of moral agency and their potential interactions with Jewish law, and suggests that this path, while enticing, may not be particularly fruitful. Second, it suggests that Jewish historical sources generally distinguish human value from human uniqueness, and that there is therefore quite a bit of room to think of an AI as a person, if we so choose, without damaging the value of human beings. Finally, it considers how Jewish thought might respond to AI as a new height of human innovation, and how the human–AI relationship shares many characteristics with the God–human relationship as imagined in Jewish sources.

This chapter reviews progress in the field of artificial intelligence, and considers the special case of the android: a human-like robot that people would accept as similar to humans in how they perform and behave in society. An android as considered here does not have the purpose to deceive humans into believing that the android is a human. Instead, the android self-identifies as a non-human with its own integrity as a person. To make progress on android intelligence, artificial intelligence research needs to develop computer models of how people engage in relationships, how people explain their experience in terms of stories and how people reason about the things in life that are most significant and meaningful to them. A functional capacity for religious reasoning is important because the intelligent android needs to understand its role and its relationships with other persons. Religious reasoning is taken here not to mean matters of specific confessional faith and belief according to established doctrines but about the cognitive processes involved in negotiating significant values and relationships with tangible and intangible others.

This chapter works through multiple valences of queerness in relation to blackness. Alongside the presence of non-normative sexual practices, intimacies, and identifications within black literatures this chapter looks at ways that blackness is often posited as already queer, part of the residue of having been hailed as property. In this reading, blackness destabilizes or “queers” the category of the person. This happens through the blurring of the categories of person and object as well as the possibility of making a distinction between an individual and a collective social identity. We might consider this person-object blurriness to be one of the effects of the processes of commodification that enslavement entailed. This estrangement from personhood though enfleshment, objectification, and loss of the mother also introduces literary possibilities of resistance in a queer register, including movements to mourn and re-find the mother, sonic resistance, and other uses of the flesh to produce forms of embodiment that evade traditional forms of capture. Here, queerness is related to finding different ways to describe orientations toward the world and pleasure.

The Consolation defends many claims about human nature and personhood, and depicts an exemplary human person, Boethius the character. This chapter synthesizes the book’s often puzzling and apparently divergent claims, while illustrating them with the depiction of the character of Boethius. It begins by outlining Boethius’ account of human powers and human nature, and then considers the Consolation’s account of human personhood. While Boethius’ account of personhood in the Consolation lacks the technical precision found in his Trinitarian works, he does give an account of some fundamental characteristics of persons consonant with his more explicit treatment in other texts. Finally, the chapter considers three distinctive themes in the Consolation’s account of human persons. First, this text controversially depicts human nature as able to change into that of a god or of a beast. Second, the Consolation depicts all human persons as microcosms, including within ourselves all aspects of the cosmos. Third, Boethius, like many classical writers, depicts human persons as most understandable in relation to beauty. Since this theme sums up earlier ones, the chapter closes there.

Technology has served a recurrent role as a utopian imaginary for speculative fiction writers and consumers. As a utopian promise, technology appears to provide individuals, communities, and whole societies with the means to overcome nature – whether it is base human natures, relationships with one’s environment, or the perceived limitations of one’s body. This chapter focuses on two similar technological fantasies, James Cameron’s Terminator films and Martha Wells’ Murderbot series. In both series, central figures – namely the T-800 played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Murderbot – approximate being human but are limited by their technological being. Yet, in being not-fully-human, they expose how technology always serves as a false utopian promise: there is no way out of our humanness through technology. In this way, technological fantasies serve as a form of horror, at once tempting readers with possibilities, but revealing those possibilities to be empty – or malignant.

AI will disrupt the existing tort settlement. Tort law should be tech-impartial – that is, it should not encourage or discourage the adoption of new technologies where they generate the same level of risk, and victim rights should not be eroded by the use of new technologies in place of existing systems of work. Existing tort law is poorly suited to address some AI challenges, and a liability gap will emerge as systems replace employees since AI does not have legal personality and cannot commit a tort. A form of AI statutory vicarious liability should apply in commercial settings to address the liability gap and as the tech-impartial solution.

The conferral of personhood is a choice made by legal systems, but just because it can be done, does not mean that it should. Analogies made between AI systems and corporations are superficial and flawed. For instance, the demand for asset partitioning does not apply to AI systems in the same way that it does with corporations and may lead to moral hazards. Conferring personhood on AI systems would also need to be accompanied with governance structures equivalent to those that accompany corporate legal personhood. Further, the metaphorical ghost of data as property needs to be exorcised.

Thomas Hobbes’ affinity for certain core conceptions of liberalism has been noted by critics and admirers alike. Nonetheless, these proto-liberal aspects have tended to be overshadowed by his more obvious institutional support for absolute monarchy. This tension has sparked generations of disagreement. While building on familiar scholarly debates, the chapter sheds light on three less explored Hobbesian conceptual revolutions. The first is Hobbes’ distinction between persons and individuals. The ascendancy of the individual at the expense of the personage gives rise to a second building block of modern conceptions of popular sovereignty: namely, the reign of quantity and the depreciation of quality. Assuming an underlying identity among such individuals, popular sovereignty is predicated on an ability to measure their respective wills quantitatively. Finally, the Hobbesian theory model of solidarity is distinguished by its aspiration to uniformity. What Hobbes castigates as asperity on the part of individual subjects must be resisted not only because the existence of discrepant wills challenges uniformity, but also because such persons are representative of differences.

The chapter traces how anthropologists reconfigured theorizing the social through gender-sensitive ethnographic work, which led to a turning away from the “society thinking” rooted in liberalist humanism, to a greater emphasis on process and on notions of sociality and the person. An appreciation of Marilyn Strathern’s contributions to this reconfiguration, at distinct moments of its history, structures the discussion, which is elaborated with reference to ethnographic analysis. Thus, the central section of the chapter considers ethnography of Indigenous Amazonian peoples, to discuss the relationship between naming, practices of the person (rather than personhood as a state), and lived sociality. This leads to a reappraisal of Mauss’s foundational essay on the person. In the penultimate section, the chapter sets out current debates on the “dividual” or “partible person” with respect to distinctions between “relationalist” and “individualist” conceptual fields of personhood. Finally, it explores how anthropology has come to investigate power and difference as part of the constitution of historically emergent personhood.

Chapter 4 explains how in traditional liberalism, autonomy as the ability to reason has been recognised as the foundation for personhood, thereby excluding adults with cognitive disability. Interpretations of Article 12 that require the abolition of decision-making by substitutes refashion autonomy from being marked by rationality and independence to being marked by shared personhood and interdependence so as to include adults with cognitive disability. I argue that these refashionings ultimately fail because despite avowals to the contrary, they perpetuate the privileging of rationality and of the bounded, independent individual. They also fail to recognise the interdependency of Article 12 with other rights in the CRPD, especially socio-economic rights. I argue that a concept of autonomy as achievement, as the development of autonomy competencies, as demanding the availability of a range of options and as demanding recognition of the indivisibility of human rights is the autonomy underpinning Article 12 and the CRPD.

Chapter 5 proposes an interpretation of Article 12 that allows for decision-making by substitutes as a last resort through relocating personhood from recognition of autonomy to recognition of dignity. It settles on a concept of dignity as inherent, as a legal principle (not a right) that underpins human rights and the CRPD, and as having five dimensions. The first dimension recognises the equal worth or value of all human beings. The second recognises autonomy as an important component of dignity for people who have autonomy but seeks to position autonomy as only one very valuable good amongst others. The third recognises dignity as reflexive and acknowledging the interdependent, interpersonal and social nature of being human. The fourth recognises personhood as embodied and particular, thereby acknowledging the residual impacts of impairment and the materiality of our lives. The fifth dimension demands an understanding of rights as interdependent and indivisible.

This chapter offers a broad overview of the dominant views of personhood and selfhood in ancient Mesoamerica. It begins with a discussion of the conception of social personhood, then turns to the issue of essence and selfhood, finally culminating in the “embedded identity” theory of personal identity that relies on these previous views.

Devoted to issues of change and continuity, Chapter 6 considers the social reproduction of families, particularly the ways in which ‘change’ and ‘continuity’ (understood as tradition) are drawn upon as tropes in moral economies of transnational kinship. In examining each generation of migrants in turn, I suggest that younger migrants assert ‘continuity through change’, a moral claim with important historical resonances, while older women generate ‘change through continuity’ in familial practices. ‘Change’ emerges as a form of social betrayal, complicating ideas of change as understood in narratives of modernity and in Christianity, particularly its presumed desirability. What is at stake in ‘having changed’, an accusation non-migrants level at migrant kin, are existential questions of personhood and belonging, along with potential access to symbolic and material resources.

Chapter 2 focuses on the migration stories of two generations of Kenyans, situating them within wider family and social histories. Although only one person in a family typically moved, I argue that their migration is better understood as family migration, rather than economic migration. While economic gain and social possibilities are related, they are not the same. Rather, these migration projects marked the convergence of individual and familial aspirations, thereby re-centring kinship as a means of realising the futures of both those who moved and those who stayed. The imaginings of migrant and non-migrant kin are important to this discussion and reveal how the United Kingdom was a largely imagined place at the time of migration, though not an arbitrary migration destination. Alongside this focus on place and space, the chapter begins to explore the role of time and temporality in the self- and life-making projects of migrants and their families.

In Chapter 5, I turn to ritualised practices of relatedness, specifically the weddings of those in London, approaching them as transnational household rituals, which contribute to the reproduction and reconfiguration of families across space. In examining migrant weddings as moments in individual and familial life cycles, I consider how these rituals offer opportunities for negotiating relations within a discourse of ‘tradition’. Moreover, I suggest that the emotionally and morally significant community of belonging, which weddings help to constitute, further mediate kinship relations. At the same time, the chapter considers non-normative weddings (registry ceremonies) and intimate relationships (come-we-stay’, or cohabiting, relationships), as well as singledom, exploring their impact on the making of persons and relations. Together, they reveal how marital and parental status shape expectations and practices of relatedness across space and moral economies of transnational kinship more generally.

This chapter argues that anthropological studies of human relationships with animals can draw our attention towards – rather than away from – the importance of representation within human ethical lives. The chapter posits that the anthropological ethical turn and the animal turn are each orientated in different ways to the concept of ‘representation’. This means the two traditions speak at cross-purposes to one another, visible particularly in their distinctive innovations in relation to ‘personhood’. From the perspective of the ethical turn, the personhood (or agency) attributed to animals by multispecies ethnographers appears ethically thin. From the perspective of the animal turn, the ethicists’ focus on varied human-held forms of reflection risks repeating dualistic distinctions and portraying animals only as they appear within human accounts. Yet the chapter shows that these two emerging traditions can benefit from one another, in attending to ‘more-than-representational’ (not non-representational) aspects of ethics. These include (1) the material/embodied form of ethical representations, (2) the fact that ethical life often seems inherently hard to represent, and (3) varied ethical attitudes towards representation (such as the ‘honesty’ sometimes associated with lack of speech) that can be seen as and when people interact with their animals.

This contribution introduces the concept of ‘victims of citizenship’, encompassing the majority of the world’s population for whom citizenship is a set of liabilities and obstacles rather than a bundle of rights, who are caged in spaces of no opportunity by border-crossing and visa rules designed to keep them out of the ‘First World’, and who thus find themselves on the ‘other side’ of the concept of citizenship, behind its Western façade of equality, political self-determination and rights. The global status quo that citizenship is there to perpetuate does not work in their favour: they are kept out for others to be ‘free’. The whole point of citizenship is to perpetuate the victims’ of citizenship exclusion from dignity and rights without any justification defensible in terms of the values officially underpinning any modern constitutional system. The path to the sale of citizenship is thus paved with the status’s conflicted nature. Marketisation is helped by the uneven pace in the growth of global wealth when compared to the dynamics of the quality of particular citizenship statuses. Simultaneously, the same processes allow the normative compatibility of citizenship with the ideals alleged to underpin contemporary constitutionalism to be called into question as such.