Back
Moral Patienthood (Wikipedia)
referenceCredibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: Wikipedia
Foundational philosophical reference for understanding which entities deserve moral consideration, directly relevant to AI welfare debates and questions about whether advanced AI systems could or should be treated as moral patients.
Metadata
Importance: 45/100wiki pagereference
Summary
This Wikipedia article defines and explores the concept of moral patienthood—the property of being an entity that deserves moral consideration and whose interests matter morally. It covers philosophical criteria for moral patienthood, including sentience, sapience, and personhood, and discusses which entities (humans, animals, AI systems) might qualify. The article is relevant to debates about AI consciousness and the ethical treatment of artificial agents.
Key Points
- •A moral patient is an entity whose wellbeing matters morally and toward whom moral agents have obligations, distinct from moral agents who bear responsibilities.
- •Common criteria for moral patienthood include sentience (capacity to feel pleasure/pain), sapience, and the ability to have interests.
- •The question of whether AI systems could be moral patients is increasingly relevant as AI becomes more sophisticated.
- •Different ethical frameworks (utilitarian, Kantian, rights-based) apply different criteria for determining moral patienthood.
- •Expanding the circle of moral patienthood has historically included animals and may eventually need to address artificial minds.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| AI Welfare and Digital Minds | Concept | 63.0 |
Cached Content Preview
HTTP 200Fetched Apr 9, 202643 KB
Moral patienthood - Wikipedia
Jump to content
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
State of mattering morally
Moral patienthood [ 1 ] (also called moral patience , [ 2 ] moral patiency , [ 3 ] moral status , [ 4 ] [ 5 ] and moral considerability [ 6 ] ) is the state of being eligible for moral consideration by a moral agent . [ 4 ] In other words, the morality of an action depends at least partly on how it affects those beings that possess moral patienthood, which are called moral patients [ 7 ] or morally considerable beings . [ 6 ]
Notions of moral patienthood in non-human animals [ 8 ] [ 9 ] and artificial entities [ 10 ] [ 11 ] have been academically explored. More detail on the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals, specifically, can be seen at the Animal rights article.
Definition
[ edit ]
Most authors define moral patients as "beings that are appropriate objects of direct moral concern". [ 4 ] This category may include moral agents, and usually does include them. For instance, Charles Taliaferro says: "A moral agent is someone who can bring about events in ways that are praiseworthy or subject to blame. A moral patient is someone who can be morally mistreated. All moral agents are moral patients, but not all moral patients (human babies, some nonhuman animals) are moral agents." [ 12 ]
Narrow usage
[ edit ]
Some authors use the term in a more narrow sense, according to which moral patients are "beings who are appropriate objects of direct moral concern but are not (also) moral agents". [ 4 ] Tom Regan 's The Case for Animal Rights used the term in this narrow sense. [ 13 ] This usage was shared by other authors who cited Regan, such as Nicholas Bunnin and Jiyuan Yu's Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy , [ 13 ] Dinesh Wadiwel's The War Against Animals , [ 14 ] and the Encyclopedia of Population. [ 15 ] These authors did not think that moral agents are not eligible for moral consideration , they simply had a different view on how a "moral patient" is defined.
Relationship with moral agency
[ edit ]
The paper by Luciano Floridi and J.W. Sanders, On the Morality of Artificial Agents , defines moral agents as "all entities that can in principle qualify as sources of moral action", and defines moral patients, in accordance with the common usage, as "all entities that can in principle qualify as receivers of moral action". [ 16 ] However, they note that besides inclusion of agents within patients, other relationships of moral patienthood with moral agency are possible. Marian Quigley's Encyclopedia of Information Ethics and Security summarizes the possibilities that they gave:
How can we charac
... (truncated, 43 KB total)Resource ID:
8ab2ca7d1a411f58 | Stable ID: sid_9M4BMfJvpf