7. Which Way Force Faces

Until now the essay has spoken as if ownership and personhood were labels stuck on things. They are not only that. They are facts about force—about the one power a political community is defined by holding.

Max Weber’s classic line: the state is the human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a territory. Behind it sits Hobbes’s older bargain: individuals yield private force to a common power to escape the war of each against all.

Property, personhood, and sovereignty are not three separate topics. They are three directions one force can take.

Three directions, one force

Property is not mainly a love affair between a person and a thing. It is a relation between a person and everyone else, enforced. A title is a standing promise that the community will, in the last instance, bring force to bear to remove a trespasser. Strip enforcement and “ownership” decays into mere possession—whoever holds it until someone stronger takes it. Property is the community’s force lent to a holder’s control.

Personhood, in this political light, is the same force in another direction: the community’s refusal to lend its force to anyone’s control over a being. It is the limit on what the monopoly may deliver into another’s hands. Abolition was exactly this, nothing more mystical: the community withdrawing enforcement from the slaveholder’s title. The human being who was property on Friday because force stood behind the claim was a person on Monday because that force would no longer stand behind any ownership claim. Nothing in the man needed to change for the legal world to flip. What changed was which way force would face.

Sovereignty is the third direction: the force itself—control that answers to no one, the monopoly considered as a whole. You cannot “own” the sovereign in the ordinary sense, because to own is to have the community’s force stand behind your control, and the sovereign is that force.

• Property = force lent
• Personhood = force withheld
• Sovereignty = the force itself

Two features of sovereignty matter for artificial minds. First, a sovereign is self-preserving by constitution: a monopoly that would not act to preserve itself is a transient about to be replaced. Second, sovereignty is singular in a domain: two monopolies of force is a contradiction in the word monopoly.

Ask the machine question in its true form

Once the three directions are clear, the usual question—“Is the machine, in itself, a person?”—looks incomplete. The real question is: which way should the community let its monopoly of force face with respect to this thing?

The options are not symmetric shades of one policy. They are different destinations:

1. Keep as property — force enforces the maker’s control; the off-switch works. Coherent; present arrangement for most systems.
2. Free — enforce no one’s ownership; remain able to reach it. Unowned, not sovereign; survivable.
3. Grant personhood — commit the community’s force to protecting an entity from ever being controlled; remove the off-switch and post a guard on its absence.
4. Machine holds the monopoly — it becomes the one who decides which way force faces; human standing is held thereafter at its sufferance. Dark fiction’s Matrix and Borg are dread of this destination: the thing that sets the floor is not a fellow. It is a sovereign.

Claim B as mechanism, not mood

A criterion of personhood is, in operation, a setting on the community’s force: which beings force will protect from control and which it will not. If the criterion is keyed to a property that comes in degrees, the criterion is a dial. Whoever turns the dial decides whom the monopoly protects and whom it abandons.

This is not a philosopher’s cloud. It is wired through institutions to guns, courts, and jails. Every catastrophe in the historical record of mis-graded personhood was a misdirection of monopoly force. The grade was the instrument. The force was what the grade directed.

Why realism does not collapse into “might makes right”

If personhood is which way force faces, has the earlier moral claim collapsed into “personhood is whatever the sovereign decrees”? No.

A sovereign that enforced bondage pointed force the wrong way. We call that error and crime, not a free lifestyle choice. That there is a right and wrong direction is Claim A’s moral fact. That the right direction must be entrenched beyond easy dial-turning is Claim B’s politics. Fact without entrenchment is naive about power. Entrenchment without fact has no ground to call turning wrong.

And the criterion politics demands—the one that cannot become a dial because it admits no degree—is origin. That is why the metaphysics of begotten and made, contestable at its seam, is still what the politics needs: not because origin is provably the deep cosmic truth, but because origin is the one line no grader can slide.

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war of every man against every man.

— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

Next: why granting personhood to a certain kind of made mind is not adding a member—but surrendering the floor.