The Monstrous Posthuman: Ethical and Legal Responses to Cyborgs, Artificial Intelligence and Robotic Entities

Abstract

As artificial intelligence, robotics, and hybrid embodiment become increasingly
embedded in daily life, legal systems are struggling to address the status, rights, and
responsibilities of these posthuman entities. This article argues that such difficulty is
not merely technical but symptomatic of deeper conceptual limitations embedded
in modern legal thought. Drawing on monster theory, posthumanist philosophy,
and speculative fiction, it contends that AI and cyborgs are consistently figured as
monstrous within legal discourse – entities that disrupt the human/non-human
binary and are thus marked for containment or exclusion.

By analysing key texts such as Ex Machina, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,
and Blade Runner, alongside legal proposals including the European Parliament’s
2017 motion on “electronic personhood” and Frank Pasquale’s New Laws of Robotics,
the article shows how monstrosity functions as a juridico-cultural strategy. This
juridico-cultural framing legitimises the exclusion of human, non-human, and
hybrid bodies construed as monstrous by casting them as deviations from the human
norm, while concealing the fact that legal personhood is a historically contingent and
epistemically unstable category rather than a fixed ontological given.

Rather than viewing monstrosity as a rhetorical flourish, the article reframes it as
a threshold category that reveals the limits of humanist law and the need to reimagine
its underlying assumptions. While this need may appear urgent at the conceptual
level, the argument does not imply a hasty juridical transformation. Legal systems are
designed to move slowly, and any incorporation of posthuman subjects must unfold
with deliberation, caution, and iterative reflection. What is at stake here is not the
acceleration of legal reform but the recognition that the epistemic conditions under
which the law operates are already shifting. Against this backdrop, the article proposes
a relational approach to legal subjectivity grounded in vulnerability, interdependence,
and distributed agency – one capable of guiding gradual yet necessary adaptations.
In this sense, speculative jurisprudence becomes not an immediate overhaul, but a
method for cultivating long-term transformations that allow the law to evolve from a
site of containment to a field of recognition and shared becoming.