The moral status of artificial intelligence entities
Abstract
The debate on the moral status of artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining increasing relevance in social and academic contexts. The inner workings of new technologies, as well as the types of responses they elicit in human users, are challenging widely rooted ethical conceptions in the social imaginary. After its predominant role in bioethics, animal ethics and ecoethics, the concept of moral status is again gaining importance in a different sense: newly emerging artificial entities appear as potential candidates for moral consideration by virtue of a possible possession of the fundamental properties of moral status. Therefore, theoretical analyses are required to address this phenomenon and account for its structure and main contents. This article takes up this task and articulates the fundamental lines of the contemporary debate about the moral status of AI. To this end, the article connects contemporary discussions with the conceptual origins of moral status while proposing as an explanatory matrix three approaches from which the debate is being addressed in the academic literature.
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