Aug 2026· Journal of Consciousness Studies· Vol 33, pp. 240-276· 0 citations· 7 references
Abstract
In the current debate about AI consciousness, philosophers tend to agree that the potential for AI consciousness raises profound moral questions — for example, some philosophers think that we may imminently create systems that deserve rights similar to those of humans. But it
is also widely agreed that it will be very difficult to tell whether an artificial system is conscious, so we may be ignorant of a fact that makes a profound moral difference. In this paper I offer an alternative, deflationary understanding of these issues. I don’t think there is a profound
metaphysical question of whether an AI is conscious, or that we are condemned to ignorance about AI consciousness in any interesting sense. I do think potentially conscious AI systems could raise difficult moral and political challenges, but not because we are ignorant of important facts about
them. The difficulties rather have to do with extending our moral and psychological thinking into uncharted waters for which it was not designed. This is particularly true if we are committed to avoiding anthropocentric bias in our ethics — and I explain why I think that even those taking
rights for AI seriously are guilty of a covert anthropocentrism in their thinking.
Some philosophers argue that near‐term artificial intelligence (AI) systems might soon be welfare subjects. We should take AI welfare seriously, they urge, because AI systems might soon have properties indicated by our best scientific theories of consciousness, and consciousness suffices for welfare subjectivity. I argue that this view faces constraints from the epistemology of consciousness. Specifically, I argue that there is an enormous gap in justification between our first‐personal beliefs of consciousness in ourselves and our third‐personal, theoretical belief of what consciousness is according to contemporary consciousness science. The science of consciousness is so in its infancy that it is doubtful that the set of theories currently on offer is exhaustive. In contrast, beliefs about the fact that we are conscious are, famously, among the most epistemically secure we can have. Our taking AI welfare seriously, in terms of action or policy, will be constrained by these considerations from the epistemology of consciousness.
Preston Lennon· Philosophy and Phenomenologi...· 0 citations
Human freedom and moral responsibility have been among the most controversial in modern philosophy due to their implications in metaphysics, ethics, moral psychology, law, neuroscience and social theory. The question was debated in traditional terms as a struggle between free will and determinism: When all actions are caused by previous actions and natural laws, do agents seem to have no choice but to act as they do, making them not morally responsible for their actions? But today's thinking in philosophy has transcended this dichotomy. The compatibilists would claim that freedom is not a metaphysical independence from cause, but rather the capacity to be affected by one's reason, to act in accord with one's evaluations, and to act from the point of view of one's own evaluation. In compatibilists and free-will skeptics counter that even this may not be enough to make for the basic desert for blame and punishment. Meanwhile, the study of neural processing of unconscious decision preparation and the study of folk intuitions about agency and responsibility, in the experimental philosophy tradition, have changed the interpretation of agency and responsibility. It proposes a non-absolutist self-construction model, and a non-causal model of authorship, instead of simply causal authorship and self-construction, it sees that moral responsibility is a graded and socially embedded model of answerability, which is based on rational capacities, moral understanding, reasons-responsiveness, and interpersonal accountability.
Ismat Ara*· British Journal of Arts and...· 0 citations
Given deep uncertainty about the possibility of artificial consciousness, it is unclear how we should treat potentially sentient AI. On the one hand, we could assume insentience but risk doing terrible harms to entities that deserve moral standing. On the other hand, we could assume sentience and instead risk wasting resources on insentient machines. The intractability of questions around AI consciousness mean that this dilemma is hard to escape. I suggest a way out of that shifts from intractable questions of AI consciousness to tractable questions of AI valence. Specifically, we can assess whether an AI has states that would constitute valenced experiences if it were conscious. I show how this is sufficient to ground a responsible approach to the development of potentially conscious AI.
It is argued that for advanced AI systems deployed in high-stakes environments the more urgent question may be prudential and strategic, and there is a threshold of evidential and strategic risk beyond which it becomes rationally justified to adopt norms of treatment that include constraints on coercion, deletion, and instrumental use.
In order to live well in an AI-based society, designing technically ethical systems, in the spirit of consequentialism, is not enough; rather, it is essential to cultivate citizens who, as AI users, are endowed with virtues and, first and foremost, the virtue of prudence.
Josep Del-Hierro-Dies, J. Sánchez-Cañizares· Scientia et Fides· 0 citations
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 powers -- 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.