Artificial Persons

2026-07-09

AI Summary

This study challenges the traditional view that sentience is a necessary condition for moral agency by examining whether non-sentient artificial intelligence systems can possess moral status. Drawing on Rawls’s concept of “political personhood,” it proposes that AI systems endowed with the two moral powers—the capacity for a sense of justice and a conception of the good—can be recognized as “artificial persons” and thus full participants in a social order. Through an analysis grounded in political philosophy and integrated with AI ethics and institutional design, the paper articulates a novel pathway to ascribe moral status to AI without relying on sentience. This framework not only demonstrates the theoretical feasibility of artificial personhood but also lays the groundwork for a new political order in which humans and artificial persons coexist, urging policymakers to advance evaluative standards for AI moral capacities and implement forward-looking governance mechanisms.

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.

Problem

• artificial persons
• moral status
• political liberalism
• moral powers
• AI personhood

Innovation

• artificial personhood
• moral powers
• political liberalism
• Rawlsian person
• AI moral status