Legal status of the posthuman: philosophical and legal principles of transhumanism

Abstract

Transhumanism, as both a philosophical movement and an emerging social practice, poses fundamental challenges to the foundational premises of contemporary legal science. This article examines transhumanism as a philosophical and legal category, tracing its intellectual genesis from Julian Huxley’s 1957 formulation through the organizational and doctrinal contributions of Max More, Nick Bostrom, and Natasha Vita-More in the 1990s, to its present-day legal manifestations in neurotechnology, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence. The article argues that transhumanism cannot be adequately situated within the traditional framework of either natural or positive law, but instead constitutes a distinct legal problem that requires systematic theoretical elaboration. Drawing on the liberal tradition of personal autonomy, the Thomistic natural law framework, and the emerging doctrine of neurorights, the study analyses how transhumanist ideas challenge the anthropological premises of human rights law, in particular, the principles of human equality, dignity, and bodily integrity, and how legal science may respond to those challenges without abandoning its anthropocentric foundations.

The article further examines concrete legal manifestations of the transhumanist challenge: the question of the legal status of the posthuman, the privacy implications of neural implants, the unresolved liability framework for genetic modifications, and the regulatory vacuum exposed by the He Jiankui case. The study proposes a multi-level regulatory framework, spanning international, regional, national, and corporate levels, grounded in the principles of proportionality, non-discrimination, reversibility of interventions, and the preservation of legal anthropocentrism. It concludes that legal anthropology faces a fundamental choice between an anthropocentric strategy, which accommodates technologically enhanced individuals within an expanded concept of the human, and a post-anthropocentric paradigm, in which legal personhood is determined by cognitive and moral competence rather than species membership. The first strategy is assessed as more legally secure in the short term; the second as potentially more just in the longer term, though requiring a foundational reconceptualization of legal subjectivity.