Legally, we are already in the posthumanist era. Corporations have long been considered persons in certain jurisdictions, despite not facing the same potential limitations on their freedom as actual people. A couple of years ago, a stretch of the Magpie river in Canada was also granted legal standing as a person, as part of an attempt to provide it with environmental protection.
And now, the “most invasive animals on earth” have also been elevated to personhood, the late Pablo Escobar’s hippos.
![Pablo Escobar's 'cocaine hippos' are being sterilized because the population is out of control | Live Science](https://i0.wp.com/cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/4ZJaBSHCSJ4sJaLcDLwiJF.jpg?w=525&ssl=1)
Ordinarily we understand posthumanism to be some sort of utopian merging of man and machine, but perhaps it might also, and better, be understood as a way of treating non-human entities with the same respect generally extended to humans.
Of course, I feel that implementing human rights (and responsibilities) for all humans might be required as a priority. We’re at risk of stratifying the world into a place where non-humans have more rights than some humans.
Which is the fundamental problem with posthumanism as a utopian ethos. Like all utopian ideals, it is utterly blind to the stratification it ushers into being, even while denying it is doing so.