What question did this study set out to answer?

The aim is to explore if AI-created bots can represent a form of posthumous agency and how this concept is understood.

July 23, 2026Australasian Journal of Philosophy0 citations

‘It's What They Would Have Wanted’: Personhood, Agency, and Executor Bots

Key Points

The aim is to explore if AI-created bots can represent a form of posthumous agency and how this concept is understood.
Utilized a thought experiment focusing on a hypothetical Executor Bot managing a deceased person’s estate.
Created two versions of Executor Bots: one executing final wishes and another evolving based on past preferences.
Applied Parfit’s philosophical framework to analyze agency in the context of bots.
Concluded that posthumous agency cannot be easily defined and is complex in nature.
Identified that the Executor Bot highlights the importance of perspectives in understanding agency.
Suggested that agency involves irreducibly perspectival features rather than a singular definition.

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly being used to create ‘bots’ that embody the conversational style and preferences of dead people. Can such bots constitute a form of extended posthumous agency? To explore this issue, this paper deploys a thought experiment built around a hypothetical ‘Executor Bot’ that administers the estate of a dead person. One version of the bot carries out the decedent’s final wishes, while another version continues to develop in the way the decedent’s preferences would have done had they not died. Utilising a version of Parfit’s (1984) ‘Nineteenth Century Russian’ case, the experiment suggests there is in fact no one thing we can simply call ‘posthumous agency’; instead, the Executor Bot points to irreducibly perspectival features agency itself.

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