neuternonpersonal

Neuternonpersonal is a neologism that appears in speculative discussions about personhood and moral status in the context of artificial agents and digital beings. The term denotes a hypothetical category of entities that do not fit neatly as persons or as non-persons, occupying an indeterminate position in between. Etymologically, it blends neutral or neuter implications with nonpersonal, signaling a status that is not fully aligned with conventional personhood yet is not categorically non-personal either.

In practice, proponents use neuternonpersonal to discuss cases like autonomous AI with limited autonomy, sophisticated avatars, or distributed systems that demonstrate some cognitive or affective features but lack unified consciousness, embodied subjectivity, or moral agency. The concept is mainly used as a thought experiment to explore questions of rights, responsibilities, and moral considerability for entities that are not clearly persons.

Status and reception: neuternonpersonal is not established in formal philosophical literature and remains informal, controversial, and sometimes criticized as vague or unhelpful. Critics argue that introducing a new category risks muddling well-defined distinctions such as person, agent, and patient, while supporters see value in clarifying borderline cases and avoiding anthropocentric bias.

Relation to related ideas: it is often discussed alongside quasi-persons, moral patients, moral agents, and artificial general intelligence debates. While it does not imply specific rights, it serves as a framework for examining thresholds of moral consideration in non-human or non-biological entities.