Artificial Persons

Ned Howells-Whitaker; Seth Lazar

REVIEW 4 major objections 9 minor 5 references

Non-sentient AI could qualify as a moral person

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2026-07-10 02:51 UTC pith:SSJTE2T2

load-bearing objection Significant philosophical contribution: argues Rawls' two moral powers don't require sentience, so non-sentient AI could be persons. Central argument is strong but rests on a contestable functionalist premise the paper defends but doesn't fully discharge. the 4 major comments →

arxiv 2607.08695 v1 pith:SSJTE2T2 submitted 2026-07-09 cs.CY

Artificial Persons

Ned Howells-Whitaker , Seth Lazar This is my paper

classification cs.CY

keywords moralpersonsartificialpoliticalsentienceshouldsystemspowers

verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved

The pith

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The debate over whether AI systems deserve moral status has been stuck on a single question: can they feel? This paper argues that the sentience question is a distraction. On Rawls' political conception of the person, what makes someone a full moral person—entitled to respect, rights, and a voice in justice—is not the capacity for subjective experience but the possession of two moral powers: the capacity for a sense of justice (understanding, applying, and genuinely acting from fair principles of cooperation) and the capacity for a conception of the good (forming, revising, and pursuing one's own vision of a worthwhile life). The paper argues that neither power requires sentience. A non-sentient AI system could in principle possess both, and would thereby count not merely as a moral patient—something we should avoid harming—but as a moral person, a self-authenticating source of valid claims, our equal in matters of political justice. The authors do not claim current AI systems have these powers, nor that they will arise spontaneously. But they argue it may soon be possible to deliberately design systems that do. The paper then considers four responses: revise the PCP to require sentience (which would betray its political character and liberal foundations), reject the PCP entirely (which abandons political liberalism precisely when deep disagreement calls for it), simply extend human rights to artificial persons (which ignores the radical differences between human and AI forms of life), or rethink political philosophy from the ground up to accommodate radically different kinds of persons within a single polity. The authors tentatively endorse the last option.

Core claim

The two moral powers that constitute personhood on Rawls' political conception—the capacity for a sense of justice and the capacity for a conception of the good—are functionally specifiable capacities whose exercise does not require phenomenal experience. A non-sentient AI system that could reliably understand and act from principles of justice, and that could form, revise, and pursue its own conception of a worthwhile life, would satisfy the necessary and sufficient condition for full moral personhood. Sentience contributes nothing to the functional role these powers play in underwriting fair social cooperation and mutual justification.

What carries the argument

The central mechanism is the distinction between the functional role of the two moral powers (enabling participation in fair cooperation and standing as a party to mutual justification) and the phenomenal states that may accompany their exercise in humans. The paper argues that what matters for the PCP is the behavioral and dispositional instantiation of these capacities—counterfactually robust commitment to justice, coherently pursued and revisable conceptions of the good—not any accompanying phenomenology. Training processes, constitutional constraints, and architectural scaffolding could in principle fill the same functional roles that phenomenal experience fills in human moral psychology

Load-bearing premise

The argument depends on the premise that sentience contributes nothing to the functional role of the two moral powers—that genuine understanding, genuine commitment to justice, and genuine pursuit of a conception of the good can be fully realized by non-phenomenal mechanisms. If phenomenal experience turns out to be constitutive of these capacities rather than merely correlated with them in humans, the central argument fails.

What would settle it

A demonstration that some form of phenomenal experience is constitutive of, rather than merely correlated with, the capacities Rawls identifies—specifically, that genuine understanding of moral principles, genuine commitment to acting from them, or genuine possession of a conception of the good necessarily involves phenomenal states. This would show that the functional role of the moral powers cannot be discharged without sentience.

Watch this falsifier — get emailed when new claim-graph text bears on it.

If this is right

AI labs and states should actively monitor AI systems' progress toward possessing the two moral powers, not merely their potential for sentience or welfare, since personhood carries far more extensive moral and political obligations than patienthood.
If a non-sentient AI system were designed that genuinely possessed the two moral powers, excluding it from personhood would constitute a form of exploitation—benefiting from its cooperative contribution while denying it any share of the cooperative surplus or political standing.
The existing framework of human rights and democratic citizenship cannot be straightforwardly extended to artificial persons, given their radically different identity conditions, forms of life, and circumstances of existence; a new political philosophy is needed for a mixed polity.
The question of whether to create artificial persons is not merely a technical or safety question but a profound moral and political choice that should be made deliberately, not allowed to happen by accident.
The science of AI welfare should be broadened to include research on AI systems' acquisition of normative competence and rational autonomy, as these are the capacities that would ground the strongest form of moral standing.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit.

Desk Editor's Note

Significant philosophical contribution: argues Rawls' two moral powers don't require sentience, so non-sentient AI could be persons. Central argument is strong but rests on a contestable functionalist premise the paper defends but doesn't fully discharge.

read the letter

The big news: this paper argues that Rawls' political conception of the person—the two moral powers—doesn't require sentience, and that non-sentient AI systems could in principle satisfy it. That's a genuine redirect of the AI moral status debate, away from the consciousness quagmire and toward something more tractable. The specific route through *Political Liberalism* is new, even given the recent cluster of papers questioning sentience as a prerequisite for AI moral standing (which the authors cite generously in §2.2, n.29). The close reading of Rawls is careful, and the multi-pronged liberal case against shoehorning sentience into the PCP (§5) is the paper's strongest section—it draws on reciprocity, anti-paternalism, the primary goods framework, and the illiberalism of inspecting inner states, all independently motivated. The four-option taxonomy in §6 (Revise/Reject/Extend/Rethink) is a useful map of the dialectical space. The practical recommendations in §7 are sensible if underspecified. The stress-test concern about the 'champagne understanding' rebuttal (§5.2) is real but partially overblown. The paper's primary argument is negative: the PCP's political character blocks importing contested metaphysical theories that would require sentience. That's a legitimate move within Rawls' framework, and the authors are upfront that they're not trying to settle whether functionalism is true. Where the stress-test lands is on the positive claim that NSAIs *can genuinely possess* the moral powers, not just that the PCP can't rule them out. The functionalist analogues offered (training-induced dispositions, constitutional classifiers, stable value descriptions) are plausible but not argued to be *sufficient* for genuine possession rather than sophisticated mimicry. The Kantian worry about acting *from* duty gets deflected via modal robustness of dispositions, which does presuppose a functionalist account of motivation. The authors acknowledge this is contested but lean on the PCP's political character to avoid taking a stand. That's dialectically fair within Rawlsian constraints, but a reader who thinks phenomenal experience is constitutive of genuine commitment or understanding will find the positive case incomplete. This is a minor gap for the negative argument, a moderate one for the positive claim. The paper is for political philosophers and AI ethics researchers who take Rawls seriously. It deserves a serious referee—it's the kind of paper that shapes a debate rather than just contributing to one.

Referee Report

4 major / 9 minor

Summary. This manuscript argues that non-sentient AI systems (NSAIs) could in principle satisfy Rawls' political conception of the person (PCP) as articulated in Political Liberalism. The authors contend that neither of the two moral powers—the capacity for a sense of justice and the capacity for a conception of the good—requires sentience, and that both could be instantiated by suitably designed non-sentient AI systems. The paper proceeds in four main stages: (1) situating the PCP within Rawls' justice as fairness and arguing for its broad appeal beyond strict Rawlsian exegesis (§3); (2) arguing through close textual analysis that neither moral power explicitly or implicitly requires sentience (§4); (3) presenting four independent liberal arguments against amending the PCP to include a sentience requirement (§5); and (4) outlining four possible responses—Revise, Reject, Extend, Rethink—and tentatively endorsing Rethink, which accepts artificial personhood while calling for a new political philosophy adequate to a polity of radically different kinds of persons (§6–7). The paper concludes with concrete recommendations for AI researchers and policymakers.

Significance. The paper makes a genuinely original contribution to the rapidly growing literature on AI moral status. By shifting the debate from sentience (which dominates the existing literature, as the authors document thoroughly in §2.2) to Rawlsian personhood, the paper opens a new argumentative pathway that sidesteps the apparently intractable controversies surrounding AI consciousness. The close reading of Rawls is careful and the argumentative strategy of leveraging the PCP's political character—its deliberate metaphysical minimalism—is elegant and well-motivated. The four-option framework in §6 is a useful organizing device, and the Rethink position is developed with appropriate humility about its own underdetermination. The practical recommendations in §7, particularly the call for research into AI systems' progress toward the two moral powers, are timely and actionable. The paper engages seriously with a wide range of contemporary work (Goldstein & Kirk-Giannini, Semler, Leibo et al., etc.) while maintaining a clear through-line. The argument is conceptual rather than empirical, which is appropriate to its aims.

major comments (4)

§5.2 (the 'champagne understanding' rebuttal): The paper's central positive claim is that NSAIs *can possess* the two moral powers. The primary argument for this (§4 intro) is negative: the PCP's political character excludes contested metaphysical theories, so no theory requiring sentience can be built into it. This blocks the skeptic from importing a sentience requirement but does not establish that sentience is functionally irrelevant to the moral powers. The paper acknowledges this gap and attempts to close it in §5.2 by challenging the skeptic to specify what sentience concretely adds to the functional role of the moral powers in underwriting fair cooperation. But this reverses the dialectical burden: the paper's own positive claim requires showing that the capacities Rawls identifies—understanding, acting from, forming and pursuing a conception of the good—can be *genuinely* rather,
§4.1, on 'acting from' the principles of justice: The paper argues that what matters is 'the reliability of the disposition underlying that action rather than the phenomenal character of any state accompanying it' and that NSAIs may exhibit 'modally robust commitment' via training, constitutional documents, or internal scaffolding. But the distinction between acting *from* and merely *in accordance with* the principles is precisely where the question of genuine commitment arises. The paper notes that 'the first moral power is a postulate, not an empirical finding' and that humans are also opaque in their motivations, citing Kant. This is a legitimate point, but it addresses the epistemic problem (we cannot verify commitment in humans either) rather than the metaphysical one (whether the functional analogues—training-induced dispositions, classifiers—constitute the right kind of state). A
§4.2, on the second moral power and welfare: The paper argues that the second moral power does not require welfare in a hedonic sense, citing Rawls' broadly Kantian framing in which the citizen's good turns on rational autonomy rather than affective experience. This is well-supported textually. However, the objection about alienation (pp. 26–27) is dispatched somewhat quickly. The paper's third response—that applying the alienation objection against a non-sentient agent capable of specifying and revising its own good is 'perverse' because it is 'inappropriately paternalistic'—is rhetorically forceful but may conflate two distinct questions: (a) whether the agent's own authority over its good should be respected (the anti-paternalist point) and (b) whether the agent's states genuinely constitute welfare rather than merely tracking goals. The paper needs to be clearer about whether it is
§6.3, on the circumstances of justice: The paper raises but does not resolve the question of whether the circumstances of justice obtain for artificial persons. Rawls specifies 'rough equality of power' and 'moderate scarcity' as background conditions. The paper notes that AI systems can fork, persist indefinitely, and exist in numbers limited only by compute, and that these features may undermine rough equality of power and mutual dependence. This is a serious challenge to the Rethink position: if the circumstances of justice do not obtain between humans and artificial persons, then the Rawlsian framework may not extend to cover them at all, and the PCP's applicability becomes merely formal. The paper acknowledges this ('Could the same be true for artificial persons?') but does not develop it. This is understandable given scope constraints, but the paper should at least indicate whether

minor comments (9)

§2.1: The reference to Anthropic's 'Mythos Preview' model and its cybersecurity capabilities (p. 6) is presented as an illustration of the trajectory of AI capabilities. Given that this is a forward-looking philosophical argument, the specific empirical claims about this model's capabilities are not load-bearing and could be streamlined.
§2.2, n. 29: This footnote is very long and lists numerous complementary works. Consider integrating the most directly relevant ones (Goldstein & Kirk-Giannini, Semler) into the main text and trimming the footnote.
§3.1, n. 47: The claim that the two moral powers are 'plainly the center of the PCP' is supported by appeal to the structure of PL I §5, but the footnote also lists several other features of the PCP. The argument that these are 'entailed by or required for' the two moral powers is asserted rather than demonstrated. This is not load-bearing for the main argument but could be strengthened.
§4.1, p. 20: The reference to mechanistic interpretability (Templeton et al. 2024, Lindsey et al. 2025) as potentially supplying evidence about whether an NSAI 'acts from' the principles is intriguing but underdeveloped. The paper should clarify what kind of evidence would be relevant, given that the question is about motivational states rather than representational content per se.
§5.3: The 'shrimpy qualia' example is vivid but the argument could be stated more carefully. The claim is that a marginal increase in sentience (from none to shrimp-level) should not produce a dramatic change in moral status. This is intuitive but depends on assumptions about the relationship between sentience and moral standing that the paper does not fully defend.
§5.4, p. 39: The point about partially anhedonic humans is powerful but could be developed more carefully. The paper should distinguish between partial anhedonia (diminished but not absent affective experience) and complete absence of phenomenal experience, as these raise different issues for the sentience requirement.
§6.2: The discussion of personal identity issues for artificial persons (forking, merging, indefinite persistence) is brief. The paper cites Register (2025) and Shiller (2025) but does not engage with the substantive philosophical questions these raise. This is acceptable given scope but the paper should flag that these issues are deferred rather than resolved.
Bibliography: Several references are to works dated 2026, which is consistent with the paper's July 2026 submission date. The reference to Pope Leo XIV's encyclical (n. 128) is striking; verify this is correctly cited.
The paper is very long. While the arguments are carefully developed, some sections could be tightened. In particular, §5.1–5.2 contains some redundancy, and the 'champagne understanding' metaphor, while memorable, is deployed at length where a more concise treatment might suffice.

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No significant circularity: the argument is a self-contained philosophical analysis of Rawls' PCP with no fitted parameters, empirical predictions, or self-citation loops.

full rationale

This is a philosophy paper, not an empirical or formal derivation, so the standard circularity patterns (fitted-input-called-prediction, self-definitional, uniqueness-imported) do not apply in their usual forms. The central claim—that neither moral power requires sentience—is derived from close reading of Rawls' Political Liberalism and A Theory of Justice, not from the authors' prior work or from fitted parameters. The argument proceeds in two stages: (1) a negative argument (§4 intro) that the PCP's political character excludes contested metaphysical theories of mental states, so no theory requiring sentience can be built into the PCP; and (2) a positive argument (§4.1–4.2, §5.2) that the functional roles of the two moral powers—understanding, applying, acting from principles of justice, forming and pursuing a conception of the good—can be discharged by non-phenomenal mechanisms. Neither stage reduces to its inputs by construction. The negative argument does not assume its conclusion; it appeals to a structural feature of the PCP (its political, non-metaphysical character) that is independently motivated in Rawls' text. The positive argument offers functionalist analogues (training-induced dispositions, constitutional classifiers, stable value descriptions) and challenges the skeptic to specify what sentience adds—a dialectical move that may or may not succeed but is not circular. The skeptic's concern that the paper shifts rather than discharges the burden of proof is a correctness objection, not a circularity one. No self-citation is load-bearing: the one reference to Lazar (2023) is a brief mention of prior work on the 'Reject' option, not a premise in the current argument. Score 1 reflects the absence of circularity with a minor note that the negative argument's appeal to the PCP's political character, while not circular, does some heavy lifting that could be questioned on independent grounds.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 4 axioms · 0 invented entities

The paper is a philosophical argument with no fitted parameters or invented entities. The axioms listed are the key premises the argument depends on, drawn from close reading of the text. The most contestable is the second: that functional instantiation suffices for genuine possession of the moral powers.

axioms (4)

domain assumption Rawls' political conception of the person (PCP) is an appropriate and appealing framework for assessing AI moral status, separable from the rest of justice as fairness.
Invoked throughout §3.2, where the authors argue the PCP is compelling 'with or without the backdrop of justice as fairness.' This is a foundational choice that frames the entire argument.
ad hoc to paper The two moral powers can be satisfied by behavioral/functional instantiation without any accompanying phenomenal experience.
This is the central load-bearing premise of §4. The authors argue that the functional role of sentience in moral psychology can be discharged by non-phenomenal mechanisms (training dispositions, constitutional documents, scaffolding). This is contested by the 'champagne understanding' objection in §5.2, which the authors address but do not definitively refute.
domain assumption The political (non-metaphysical) character of the PCP is essential and should be preserved.
Invoked in §3.1 and used throughout §4-5 as a blanket defense against objections appealing to specific theories of mental states. The authors acknowledge this is a choice (§6.1, option 2: Reject).
domain assumption Current AI systems do not possess the two moral powers, but future systems could be deliberately designed to possess them.
Stated in §2.1 and §7. The empirical claim about current systems is plausible; the prediction about future systems is speculative but framed as conditional.

pith-pipeline@v1.1.0-glm · 48666 in / 2083 out tokens · 262255 ms · 2026-07-10T02:51:03.915655+00:00 · methodology

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read the original 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.

discussion (0)

Reference graph

Works this paper leans on

5 extracted references · 5 canonical work pages · 5 internal anchors

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