Comment by robot-wrangler
Comment by robot-wrangler 21 hours ago
Personhood for non-persons is definitely absurd. But if you're actually stuck with a broken system, then the most logical thing to do is at least apply your broken logic consistently. That's an important part of the difference between rule of law and wild corrupt barbarism. Of course it's much better to actually fix absurdities, but if you can't or won't, inconsistency still has to be forbidden or else the whole thing is a farce
I'm a bit reminded of the days before Unix-style pipelining and abstract I/O streams like "standard input and output". Mainframe operating systems would instead support devices like "virtual card readers" and "virtual line printers". When you created a COBOL program on disk and scheduled a compile job for it, the system would set up a virtual card reader to accept the program as input and direct the logs to a virtual printer. How to set this up was specified using JCL on IBM iron.
It seems that "virtual personhood" was set up to address deficiencies in our legal system regarding who or what may be party to a lawsuit, etc.