soul-frame/research/law-governance/moral-legal-personhood-charter.md

Charter: Moral/Legal Personhood — A Separate Companion Research Line

Workplan: SOUL-WP-0009-T05, resolved 2026-09-28 Status: charter only — this note scopes a future companion line; it does not attempt the mapping itself.

Why this needs its own charter

SCOPE.md names "silent moral/legal personhood claims" as explicitly out of scope for the core Soul Frame research program, routed instead to "law/ governance literature map only; no premature derivation." Soul Frame's descriptive core (Being, Personhood-descriptive, Recognition) is built to answer "what is this, structurally" without answering "what follows morally or legally" — collapsing the two would violate the framework's own design boundary (concepts/personhood.md's four-kinds table: descriptive, social, moral, legal, never collapsed).

The paper's research agenda (draft §17 item 4) nonetheless flags that readers will want the "so what follows" answer. This charter exists so that work can proceed on that question without loosening the descriptive core to get there — by defining a companion line with its own scope.

Scope (what the companion line would cover)

1. Legal personhood precedent survey — ✅ first slice executed as legal-personhood-precedent-survey.md (SOUL-WP-0010-T03, 2026-09-28) — corporate personhood, animal welfare/rights law, AI legal-personality proposals (e.g. EU robot- personhood debate), personality/publicity rights (SF-R110), digital estates (SF-R111) — building outward from the existing gap sketch in research/law-governance/sp-gh-legal-gap-sketch.md.
2. Moral status literature survey — moral patienthood conditions (sentience-based, interest-based, relational accounts), independent of Soul Frame's descriptive Beinghood — checking where descriptive Beinghood profiles correlate with existing moral-status arguments without implying them.
3. Explicit non-derivation statement — for each descriptive Soul Frame concept (Being, Sp., Gh., Persona), a companion-line entry stating what moral/legal conclusion, if any, commentators have tried to draw from a structurally similar concept, and why Soul Frame's descriptive core does not itself license that conclusion.
4. Jurisdictional variance tracking — law/governance material is explicitly jurisdiction-specific (sp-gh-legal-gap-sketch.md already flags this); the companion line should track variance rather than average it into one global claim.

Non-goals (what the companion line must not do)

• Must not feed conclusions back into Terminology.md, Claims.md, or concepts/*.md as if they were descriptive findings. A moral/legal finding is filed in this companion line's own output, cross-referenced from the descriptive concept files, never merged into them.
• Must not be used to argue that a system with a high descriptive Beinghood profile therefore has moral standing or legal rights, or the converse (low profile → no standing). The correlation question (item 2 above) is explicitly weaker than a derivation.
• Must not attempt a single universal legal position — jurisdictional variance is tracked, not resolved into one answer.
• Must not become a gate for the descriptive paper's publication — paper/draft.md already states its ethical/legal section (§14) as a bounded sketch, and the companion line does not need to mature before the descriptive paper proceeds through its own pathway (SOUL-WP-0009-T06).

Relationship to existing work

• Extends research/law-governance/sp-gh-legal-gap-sketch.md rather than duplicating it.
• Cross-references concepts/personhood.md's four-kinds table as the boundary this charter exists to respect.
• Does not extend or modify paper/draft.md §14 (Ethical and Legal Implications) — that section stays a bounded sketch in the descriptive paper; deeper treatment belongs here.

Next step

This charter is not itself a workplan. If pursued, it should become its own future workplan (e.g. SOUL-WP-0010 or later) with its own task breakdown, scoped narrowly enough (e.g. "legal personhood precedent survey only" as a first slice) to avoid re-opening the whole moral/legal question at once. Not opened now — SOUL-WP-0009-T05's done condition is this charter existing, not the companion line's work starting.

Update 2026-09-28: the first slice was picked up exactly as scoped — SOUL-WP-0010-T03 produced legal-personhood-precedent-survey.md (item 1 only). Items 2–4 remain unstarted future slices.