Artificial Persons
2026-07-09 • Computers and Society
Computers and Society
AI summaryⓘ
The authors challenge the usual idea that an AI must be sentient to have moral status. Using Rawls' idea of moral personhood, they say that being a 'person' depends on having two moral powers: understanding justice and having a conception of the good, which do not require sentience and could in theory be in AI. They argue this means some AI could be full moral persons, not just beings with rights but active claim-makers. They caution against ignoring this possibility or simply applying human rights to AI, suggesting instead we need new political ideas and careful research to guide the creation of such artificial persons.
AI sentiencemoral statusRawls political conception of the personmoral powerssense of justiceconception of the goodartificial personhoodpolitical liberalismAI welfaremoral claims
Authors
Ned Howells-Whitaker, Seth Lazar
Abstract
Both advocates and skeptics of the moral status of AI systems have generally taken the question to turn on AI sentience. We present an alternative approach. On Rawls' political conception of the person (PCP), possession of the two moral power -- the capacities for a sense of justice and a conception of the good -- is the "necessary and sufficient condition for being counted a full and equal member of society in questions of political justice". We argue that neither moral power requires sentience and that both may in principle be possessed by a non-sentient AI system. Such a system would share our own moral status; it would not merely be a patient but a person, a self-authenticating source of valid claims. We do not believe current AI systems possess the two moral powers, nor that they will spontaneously emerge in future models. But it may soon be possible to design systems with these powers. How should we respond? Excluding artificial persons by shoehorning a sentience requirement into the PCP is ill-advised. Many will instead favor abandoning the PCP. But we should not reject political liberalism just when we most need its measured response to deep disagreement, and building sentience into moral status is anyway unacceptable on deeper liberal grounds. Simply extending the rights and responsibilities of human personhood to artificial persons is equally untenable, given their many differences from natural persons. We should instead accept artificial personhood while rethinking what we would owe to one another in a polity of radically different kinds of persons. This new possibility calls for a new political philosophy. More immediately, the growing science of AI welfare should be accompanied by research into AI systems' progress in acquiring the two moral powers. States and AI labs must be more deliberate in determining our trajectory towards (or away from) creating artificial persons.