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A comment on The Whanganui River in New Zealand is a legal person.

Re:The Whanganui River in New Zealand is a legal person by yayr on Monday April 22, 2019 @05:34PM (#19723212)
I find this philosophical debate very fascinating. What actually is a person? e.g. one definition claims

PERSON = "any entity that has the moral right of self-determination."

http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/what_is_a_person/what_i...

so can a confinable area of nature like a river, a mountain, a planet etc. be such an entity with those rights? Who grants those rights? How is self-determination recognized?

For humans the latter is leading to the free will debate, see e.g. here for a start https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Philosophy/Wha...

so in essence, if a significant amount of humans agree, that the criteria for self-determination are not only the strict ones expressed by humans, why should a natural entity not be treated like a person?

edit: the initial reaction so far has been: it can not stand up in court so it cannot be a LEGAL person. So one could challenge: a company can as well not speak in court. The only ones speaking in court are representatives that got somehow chosen. Why could the same not be applied to the person in discussion here?

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Re:The Whanganui River in New Zealand is a legal person by pan69 on Monday April 22, 2019 @05:37PM (#19723237)
Not "person", but "legal person":

> an individual, company, or other entity which has legal rights and is subject to obligations.

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Re:The Whanganui River in New Zealand is a legal person by cperciva on Monday April 22, 2019 @05:40PM (#19723265)
why should a natural entity not be treated like a person?

The obvious answer here is "ok, they're all persons, and as soon as they can stand up in court and tell us what they want, we'll listen to them".

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Re:The Whanganui River in New Zealand is a legal person by peeters on Monday April 22, 2019 @06:33PM (#19723713)
To which the obvious counterpoint is "ok, so mentally incapacitated people shouldn't have rights because they can't articulate them?"
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Re:The Whanganui River in New Zealand is a legal person by refurb on Monday April 22, 2019 @08:44PM (#19724584)
To which I would reply “Disabled people are humans, so there are non-disabled humans who have articulated universal rights.”
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Re:The Whanganui River in New Zealand is a legal person by dragonwriter on Monday April 22, 2019 @07:01PM (#19723918)
We have well established systems in law for persons without capacity to either represent themselves or even designate a representative to have their legal interests represented, because this happens with existing legal persons (even natural persons) with some regularity.
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