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

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Department of Law, Yasuj, Islamic Azad University, Yasuj, Iran.

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

Abstract

Can a legal order still tell an agent from an instrument, a person from a thing, the author of a decision from the medium through which the decision passes? This article treats that question as the philosophical core of artificial intelligence law rather than as a preliminary to it. Our answer is that the three distinctions cannot be saved as descriptions of what entities are, and that they need not be: they survive as allocations of answerability, made by the legal order and defensible only as such. Three arguments carry the claim. The first is ontological: following Gunkel's trilogy, we hold that the machine is an anomaly the person and thing partition cannot absorb, and that reification and personification are two forms of a single refusal to think it. The second is jurisprudential: the regulatory philosophies of the European Union, the United States and China are best read not as bundles of rules but as three theories of action under doubt, corresponding with unexpected precision to precaution (ihtiyat), presumptive permissibility (asalat al ibaha) and the expediency grounded governmental ruling (hukm hukumati) in Imami legal theory. The third is constructive: Iran inhabits not a legislative vacuum but a mantaqat al-faragh in alSadr's sense, a bounded zone of discretion whose emptiness is itself normatively structured and which is already being filled by licensing and infrastructure policy rather than by legislation. From these we derive a principle we call the assignable answer, and five design consequences of a law that stops asking what a machine is and undertakes instead to say who must answer for it.

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

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References

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Journal of Philosophical Investigations
Volume 20, Issue 56 - Serial Number 56
Articles
Issue 56, Autumn 2026
October 2026
Pages 121-142

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