Judaism and personhood

Slate still occasionally throws up interesting articles, between the salacious allegedly true sex/relationship advice bits.

This one, for example:  What We Can All Learn From How Jewish Law Defines Personhood in A.I., Animals, and Aliens.

Cool!

Here are some key paragraphs:

For many rabbis, humans are valuable whether or not they are unique; not only could other beings share some of our “essential” human characteristics, but a few actually do. Rather than protectively shrinking from this expanded notion of humanity, rabbis have historically been very open to the idea of nonhuman sentience and have tended to see parallels between humans and nonhumans as an excuse to treat nonhumans better.

Evidence for this position isn’t hard to find. Take demons, for example. In rabbinic literature demons are not inherently evil; they are mortal beings with agency, sometimes imagined as the unintended offspring of human beings, and their existence doesn’t pose existential threats to human value. The rabbis also record the existence of an animal called “the man of the field,” which so resembled human beings (one modern rabbi speculated that it was an orangutan) that its corpse is afforded some of the dignity of human dead, and medieval German rabbis talked about vampires and werewolves—sometimes even reading them into the Bible—without any concern about what their existence might entail.

As for beings that aren’t imaginary, Jewish thinkers—like many modern animal rights groups—have tended to value them on a gradient, with animals above plants and plants above inanimate objects. The reason for this, in some strains of thoughts, is that all of these creations are ensouled; the human soul has extra pieces, but it shares much with other beings. In both the Bible and the Talmud, people are regularly criticized for treating animals badly, with the critique occasionally coming from the animals themselves....

The most powerful example of all is the golem. The medieval golem isn’t a proto-robot, and it isn’t a parable about uncontrolled power. Instead, it’s something far more radical: It is a person, one who is brought into existence for the sole purpose of demonstrating that humans, like God, are powerful enough to create life. That humans and golems are essentially the same is the whole point; humans, for the rabbis, are also an artificial intelligence; the first being to be called a golem is Adam. Instead of diminishing human value, the possibility of making golems asks that people appreciate their true power and act accordingly.

Discussions about aliens, golems, and animals occupy very different parts of Jewish thought.
What brings them together is the belief that human value is axiomatic, and that it is precisely because of the unassailability of our value that our instinct should be toward expanding the idea of what is human when we recognize it in others. This idea has a very important corollary: because human value is the basis for valuing these near-humans, the latter can never supersede the former in importance. In other words, this model both allows us to be generous with the idea of humanity while resolving concerns that our own status will become diminished in the process.