November 9, 2025
By Stephen Stofka
In 1858, Abraham Lincoln challenged Illinois’ incumbent Senator Judge Stephen Douglas. From mid-August to mid-September, the two candidates held a series of seven debates. The main focus of those debates was whether slavery should be expanded into the new territories to the west. In the first debate, a crowd of more than 10,000 stood for more than two hours in the hot, dry weather (Source).
Lincoln aimed for the loyalties of those in the audience who were in the middle between two strong positions. There were the outright abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of the Liberator, an anti-slavery newspaper. Prominent proponents of slavery were South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, who thought that slavery had helped the negro achieve “a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually” (Source). Lincoln cautioned that he did not espouse “political and social equality between the white and black races,” and that he did not want to “interfere with the institution of Slavery in the states where it exists.”
Lincoln argued that negroes were entitled to “all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The crowd cheered his sentiment. Lincoln granted that the two races, black and white, might not be equal in “moral or intellectual endowment,” but that a negro had an equal right to “eat the bread … which his own hand earns.” The crowd enthusiastically agreed.
This week I want to look at two axes, personhood and rights. We can categorize persons into two categories, natural and artificial. We can categorize rights as natural, or human, and political.
Let me start with personhood. What distinguishes an artificial and a natural person? We might say that the first category are those entities created by law. They have agency like human beings. At first glance, religious doctrine might easily separate natural and artificial persons. Natural persons have souls. Artificial persons do not. But wait, does God have a soul? God is soul so of course, He does. So is God a natural person? But God was not born of a woman. Ah, but Jesus was. In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas was the first to try to resolve the contradictions between Aristotelian logic and the Christian faith. No wonder the Supreme Court does not want to directly handle the topic of personhood.
Let’s turn to a fundamental doctrine of Christianity, the three persons of the Trinity? Are they natural or artificial persons? The doctrine was not fully formalized and decreed until the First Council of Constantinople in 381 A.D. (Source). So we might expand our criteria for artificial persons to include those created by law, or decree. Since men have dominated our political and religious institutions for many centuries, we can say that artificial persons are those created by men. Natural persons are those created, or birthed by a woman.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the history of the personhood of corporations, a status granted not by Congress or the Constitution, but by the Supreme Court’s acceptance of a lie (Source). In an 1819 case Dartmouth College v Woodward, the Supreme Court decided that the New Hampshire legislature could not amend a colonial charter made before the United States came into existence. Dartmouth was a private corporation and enjoyed the protections of the contracts clause in the Constitution (Source). In the early 1820s, Google Ngram viewer shows that the use of the word “corporation” spiked as investors rushed to take advantage of this court interpretation (Source).
A corporation cannot vote, run for office, or get married. They do not enjoy a Second Amendment right, nor are they protected against self-incrimination by the Fifth Amendment (Source). However, the courts have granted them many other rights specified in the Bill of Rights. These include the First, Fourth, Sixth and Seventh Amendments (Source). These are political rights, not human rights.
In a 2014 article published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Brandon Garrett, a Professor of Law at the U. of Virginia School of Law, noted that the court has not offered any theory as to why corporations have some Constitutional rights like human beings but not others (Source, pg. 4). The court has indicated that some rights are exclusively personal, but has not wanted to address the question of what distinguishes a person. If some rights are personal, then the court has implicitly decided that some political rights are natural while others are not. What are some of the differences between the two sets of rights and where do they intersect?
Lincoln argued that people of all races had some basic rights in common. One of these was the right to enjoy the fruits of our labor. We can trace that to John Locke, who argued that God himself had commanded that Adam till the land for his survival (Genesis 3:23). In Two Treatises, he wrote “Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation, that it is hardly to be conceived that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it” (Source, p. 7)
Do corporations have a right to the fruits of their own labor? No, those fruits, or profits, belong to the shareholders of the corporation. Both slaves and corporations are owned, bought and sold as capital. Eighteenth and 19th century advocates of slavery argued that wage earners were little different than slaves and enjoyed less security than slaves. They deliberately muddied the difference between buying a worker’s labor and buying the worker himself.
A worker can alienate, or separate himself from his labor. A key principle of natural rights like those declared in the Declaration of Independence is that people cannot separate themselves from those rights. They are integral to a human being. Political rights given to human beings may be derived from those natural rights. If a person has a natural right to liberty, then they have a right to free speech as long as that speech does not cause immediate harm to others.
Artificial persons have no integral natural rights. They may enjoy certain political rights but those political rights can never be derived from natural rights. A corporation may enjoy certain liberties under contract law, but contract law is constructed by governing bodies. With a nod to their own self-preservation, artificial persons must be more politically active than human beings. Corporations are keenly aware that any rights they do enjoy have no philosophical or ethical foundations. They must act in their own self-interest, lobby and cajole to gain and protect their rights.
In finance, business and politics, we distinguish between agent and principal. If an LLM were trained only on the writing of one person, would it be an agent of that person or an extension of that person? If that LLM were to make public threats on social media against a government official, could the FBI arrest the person as a threat? Probably not. We still treat AI as a tool, not as a person. Could that change?
Earlier I said that natural persons were created or birthed by a woman. Some claim that God creates human beings. Women are the vessel of that creative spark, the conduit between the eternal world of God and the temporary world here on earth. Based on that belief, anti-abortionists blur the distinctions between a zygote, the single cell formed from the union of sperm and egg, and a human being living separately outside the body of its mother. In their view, the zygote is a person.
People often bestow a sense of person on their pets. They may feel a greater closeness, a sense of intimacy, with their pets than they do with their own family members. Some animal rights activists do advocate for pet personhood, a recognition that animals have rights to more than a protection from inhumane treatment.
People often treat their claims and beliefs as fact, especially if they are surrounded by others who hold the same beliefs. In an article published this week in Nature Machine Intelligence, Mirac Suzgun et al (2025) found that AI Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have difficulty separating beliefs from facts. An AI reading the phrase “I believe that the world is 6000 years old” may inform young Johnny of that fact when he uses an AI to help him with his homework. We call such statements from an AI a “hallucination” but when a human being makes the same statement, we call it a “belief.” Why? We treat a computer as a machine. We treat a human being, no matter how deluded, as a person.
If an LLM can confuse opinion and facts just like a human being, is an LLM a person? We might scoff at the idea but many people scoff at the idea that corporations are treated as persons under the Constitution and the law. If an AI model demonstrates thoughtful intent, a key characteristic of a human being, is that model a person? If an LLM were to learn and copy all the flaws and virtues of humanity, to show mercy as well as aggression, is it a person?
If an LLM with access to weapons controls hurt other people or disabled other LLMs to protect itself, it it a person? This was the subject of a 1968 Star Trek episode, The Ultimate Computer (Source).Dr. Daystrom has built a supercomputer, called the M-5, to automate the functions on a starship. Dr. Daystrom has become so intimate with the reasoning of the computer he built that he thinks of it as his son. When the M-5 starts acting strangely during war game exercises, it becomes a real threat to human beings. Dr. Daystrom tries to prevent the members of the Starship Enterprise from destroying his creation, defending the computer as though it were part of his own flesh and blood.
Will we become so attached to our AI companions that we defend their rights as we defend our own? An AI synthesizes human thoughts and ideas, but a person is more than thoughts and ideas. A person who is brain dead but kept alive by extraordinary means is still regarded as a natural person because biological processes continue until the time of death.
I keep coming back to the question of what are the distinguishing characteristics of a person. A natural person must pass many more tests than an artificial person. Therefore, a natural person should have many more political rights than an artificial person like a corporation. I hope that AI introduces so many conflicts in legal reasoning that the courts eventually revisit their jurisprudence and decide that artificial persons do not have First Amendment rights.
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Image by ChatGPT
Suzgun, M., Gur, T., Bianchi, F. et al. Language models cannot reliably distinguish belief from knowledge and fact. Nat Mach Intell (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-025-01113-8
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