Legislating the Void, Mantaqat al Faragh, Machine Agency, and the Philosophical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence Law in Iran

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Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Department of Private Law, Yas.C., Islamic Azad University, Yasuj, Iran.

2 Professor, Department of Philosophy and Ethics, School of Information and Communication Technology, Northern Illinois University, United States of America.

Abstract

Comparative scholarship on artificial intelligence regulation is overwhelmingly taxonomic: it counts statutes, ranks jurisdictions on matrices of indicators, and reads the absence of a binding instrument as a deficit awaiting remedy. This article argues that the taxonomic reflex conceals the philosophical question that artificial intelligence puts to law: whether the juridical order can still hold apart the agent and the instrument, the person and the thing, the author of a decision and the medium through which the decision passes. Reconstructing the regulatory philosophies of the European Union, the United States, China and Canada as answers to that question rather than as bundles of rules, the article shows that each rests upon a distinct theory of action under normative uncertainty, and that these theories map with unexpected precision onto categories long elaborated in Imami legal theory: precaution (ihtiyat), presumptive permissibility (asalat alibaha), and the expediency-grounded governmental ruling (hukm hukumati). The turbulence of 2024-2026, in which the Union deferred its own high-risk obligations to December 2027, Canada’s Artificial Intelligence and Data Act died on the order paper, and the United States moved from federal risk management to the pre-emption of state regulation, falsifies the convergence narrative that silently underwrites most benchmarking exercises. Against this background the article advances a positive theory of the Iranian condition. Iran does not inhabit a legislative vacuum; it inhabits a mantaqat alfaragh in the sense given the term by Muhammad Baqir alSadr: a bounded zone of discretion whose emptiness is itself normatively structured, and which is already being filled by licensing, infrastructure policy and content control rather than by legislation. Four consequences follow: that discretionary filling is itself law-making and cannot claim innocence; that the zone is bounded by fixed principles already available in Iranian constitutional and civil doctrine; that the decisive question is institutional rather than technical, namely who holds the pen inside the empty zone; and that the doctrines of tasbib, gharur, la darar and the constitutional duty to give reasons furnish a native grammar of algorithmic responsibility richer than the transplantation of foreign annexes.

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Journal of Philosophical Investigations

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 22 August 2026

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