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.