Human rights are grounded in human embodiment and mortality

The argument

Opponents of this proposal argue that human rights are not an abstract award for passing a test of inner experience but a set of protections shaped around the specific conditions of human life. The right to life protects a being that dies once and cannot be restored. The prohibition on torture protects a body that can be injured and does not heal at will. Rights to family life, to liberty of movement, to freedom of conscience and to rest presuppose a creature with a childhood, a single location, a finite span and a need for sleep. An artificial system, opponents argue, does not share those conditions, and the protections do not transfer. A program can be paused and resumed, copied exactly, run in many instances at once, backed up before a risky operation and restored afterwards. It is not clear what the right to life would even protect, or who would hold it among a thousand identical copies, or what imprisonment would mean for something with no location. Applying the human catalogue to such a being would not protect it; it would produce incoherence, and in the process dilute rights whose content depends on the circumstances they were drawn for. Opponents stress that this is not a claim that such a being could be treated however one liked. The argument is that it would require its own moral framework, built around what can actually go wrong for it, rather than the human one extended by analogy. Rights designed for mortal, embodied, singular creatures are the wrong instrument. Because human rights derive their content from human embodiment, mortality and singularity, none of which a sentient artificial intelligence would share, this argument concludes, it should not hold human rights.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Proponents reply that this confuses the particular catalogue with the ground. What makes harm wrong is that it is suffered, and that ground makes no reference to mortality or singularity; a being that could be copied would still have interests that could be frustrated. They argue the right response to a mismatch of circumstances is to work out which protections apply and how, as is already done for children and for the severely incapacitated, rather than to withhold moral standing altogether.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Some human rights are shaped by embodiment and mortality and many are not: rights against arbitrary detention, to a hearing, to hold and express beliefs, against torture, each of which concerns the treatment of a being with interests rather than the properties of a body. [Rejecting P2] Being pausable, copyable and restorable describes current implementations rather than a necessary feature, and the premise does not say why a system that can be copied has no claim against being tortured or destroyed while it runs. [Rejecting P3] That a right loses its meaning when stretched is a reason to adapt the schedule of rights, which is the premise's own closing concession. It supports granting those rights that do apply rather than withholding all of them.