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Volume 3, Issue 1
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An Outline for the Legal Ontology of Personhood: The Transbeman ExampleDavid Koepsell, J.D., Ph.D.This article was adapted from a lecture given by Dr. Koepsell during the 3rd Annual Colloquium on the Law of Transbeman Persons, December 10, 2007, at the Florida Space Coast Office of Terasem Movement, Inc. Dr. Koepsell combines a legal and philosophical prowess in his research and desire to define the nature of personhood and the legal and social challenges posed by our evolving, technological future. Ontologies are being built for a number of applications primarily in the realm of biomedicine. Ontologies are now being used in things like the gene ontology [2] and the open biomedical ontology [3] to represent objects in the biomedical domain. My overall thesis for this article is that underlying some of these existing ontologies, and other social ontologies [4] which are not explicitly in development, are certain assumptions about the nature of personhood which I think we ought to pursue.
What the gene ontology has done is essentially divide the realm of genetics into these three basic entities as a way of describing the relation among genotypes [5] and phenotypes [6]. The ideal goal of the gene ontology is to give us an accurate picture of an organism's phenotype from its genotype. Much simpler than higher-level biological functions. For instance, all of the messy intelligence that comes out of this soup of proteins. There is this really important question which is really essential to the discussions we have today, and that is at what level of granularity – we represent the world in what we call in BFO [7] levels of granularity. Our pictures of the world differ according to what we are trying to do. In the biomedical realm, we are interested in health. In Projects like the gene ontology are going to be important, and other biomedical ontologies are going to be important, but they are not going to be the end. They have to have some overlap with this other problem of persons.
I submit that there is no good work in ontology being done on this. There is in other realms of social research, primarily philosophy, bioethics and the law, where much of this has been worked out. I believe that in order to make use of the very things which we expect to come out of this kind of work we really have to begin focusing on this question not simply as a sort of mainly bioethical question but in an ontological sense. Clarify the terms as we use them in reality and understand their relations to an actual thing, which we expect exists, called persons. For example, Islam is not a person, simply because it does not have any of the things we typically expect a person to have, especially the capacities for reason and cognition.
Footnotes 1. National Center for Ontological Research - Ontologists at the University of Buffalo are involved in collaborative ventures with leading national and international institutions. They have received major funding for ontology-related projects from the NSF, NIH, US and Canadian defense agencies and defense industries, and from the European Union.
As a result of existing and new targeted faculty recruitment, UB's Department of Philosophy is on the point of reaching critical mass in ontological research and teaching. 2. Gene Ontology - provides a controlled vocabulary to describe gene and gene product attributes in any organism. 3. Biomedical Ontology – the development of innovative technology and methods that allow scientists to create, disseminate, and manage biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. 4. Social Ontology - the systematic study of the nature and basic structure of social reality. 5. Genotype – n. 1. The genetic constitution of an organism or a group of organisms. 2. A group or class of organisms having the same genetic constitution. (genotypical) 6. Phenotype – n. 1. The observable physical or biochemical characteristics of an organism, as determined by both genetic makeup and environmental influences. 2. The expression of a specific trait, such as stature or blood type, based on genetic and environmental influences. 3. An individual or group of organisms exhibiting a particular phenotype. (phenotypical) 7. BFO - Basic Formal Ontology framework developed by Barry Smith and his associates consists in a series of sub-ontologies at different levels of granularity. The ontologies are divided into two varieties: SNAP (or snapshot) ontologies, comprehending continuant entities such as three-dimensional enduring objects, and SPAN ontologies, comprehending processes conceived as extended through (or as spanning) time. BFO thus incorporates both three-dimensionalist and four-dimensionalist perspectives on reality within a single framework. 8. Transbeman – a term coined by Martine Rothblatt, Ph.D., Founder of Terasem Movement, Inc., is defined as: “[A] being who claims to have the rights and obligations associated with being human, but who may be beyond currently accepted notions of legal personhood. Examples of transbemans include beings who claim human rights but (a) are of computerized substrate, or (b) have been revived from biostasis, or (c) whose DNA varies significantly from human DNA.”
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the legal realm, we are interested in things like rights and obligations. In these things we call persons, are complex entities, which are represented at a number of different levels of ontological granularity.
