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Animals, slaves, and beyond: The role of values in the extensional beliefs and discrepancy argument in Visa Kurki’s A

This article introduces and critically evaluates some of the main assumptions of Visa Kurki’s book, A Theory of Legal Personhood. First, we discuss Kurki’s choice of ‘extensional beliefs’ about legal personhood. On this view, human beings who are born, alive, and sentient, as well as artificial persons such as corporations, are legal persons, while animals, foetuses, and slaves are not legal persons. These beliefs serve as the ground on which different theories of rights are compared, and on the strength of these comparisons Kurki seeks to show that, contrary to the orthodox view, being a right-holder does not always coincide with being a legal person, and therefore a new analysis of legal personhood is needed. We argue that the choice of these extensional beliefs is not as value-neutral as Kurki claims and that some grossly immoral beliefs about legal personhood need not be included among them as a reference point for conceptual analysis, even if those beliefs were once widely accepted. Second, we discuss the “interest” and “will" theories of rights to question whether there is genuinely a clear discrepancy between right-holders and standard categories of legal persons. Establishing this discrepancy requires resorting to contestable value commitments and interpretations of legal reality. Our criticisms do not affect the value of Kurki’s fine-grained analysis of legal personhood made by reference to various “incidents”.