View Cyborg citizenship
Cyborg citizenship is a conception of rights based on personhood rather than on “humanness.” Not all persons are humans, and not all humans are persons. Cyborg citizenship is the opposition to conceptions of rights based on human racism.
As a form of non-anthropocentric personhood ethics, cyborg citizenship recognizes the rights of cyborgs, but also the rights of the more cognitively complex animals with extensive capacities for feeling, and the rights of posthumans. On the other hand, cyborg citizenship is not concerned with the rights of humans who have not reached or are past the point of being persons, such as embryos and the brain dead.
Cyborg citizenship also recognizes the rights of cryonics patients to be preserved and revived when the appropriate technologies become available.
Human Racism
Bioluddites advance the doctrine of human racism, that humanness is the sole determinant of worth. To human-racists, the rights of human fetuses and the brain dead must be preserved, while extending human rights to transhumans or uplifted animals would threaten the basis on which “human” rights are based: the human genome.
Unfortunately, while documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) have been crucial in securing numerous social goods, they have been subsumed in the language of human-racists. Even while the Universal Declaration of Human Rights prohibits discrimination based on race or other birth statuses, its language does not include humanness in its list of irrelevant birth statuses as it should. The Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights is more explicit in its human-racism, saying that the human genome is the basis for “the fundamental unity of all members of the human family, as well as the recognition of their inherent dignity and diversity.”
Cyborg citizenship would embrace rights that are more consistent and in some areas broader, on the basis of what the UDHR calls “reason and conscience.” Cyborg citizenship could be extended to animals such as Great Apes, artificial intelligences, chimeras, clones, possible extraterrestrial lifeforms, posthumans, robots, transhumans, and uplifted animals. On the other hand, human-racists are likely to see the extension of rights to any of these persons as a fundamental assault on human dignity, while clinging to the rights of the those who have undergone brain death (information-theoretic death with no hope of revival) and seeing even the embryos that are discarded in in vitro fertilization as a tragic loss of life.
Sources:
Citizen Cyborg by James Hughes