Artificial Consciousness and Artificial Ethics: Between Realism and Social-Relationism

I compare a ‘realist’ with a ‘social-relational’ perspective on our judgments of the moral status of artificial agents (AAs). I develop a realist position according to which the moral status of a being particularly in relation to moral patiency attribution is closely bound up with that being’s ability to experience states of conscious satisfaction or suffering (CSS). For a realist both moral status and experiential capacity are objective properties of agents. A social-relationist denies the existence of any such objective properties in the case of either moral status or consciousness, suggesting that the determination of such properties are rests solely upon social attribution or consensus. A wide variety of social interactions between us and various kinds of artificial agent will no doubt proliferate in future generations, and the socialrelational view may well be right that the appearance of CSS-features in such artificial beings will make moral-role attribution socially prevalent in human-AA relations. But there is still the question of what actual CSS states a given AA is actually capable of undergoing, independently of the appearances. This is not just a matter of changes in the structure of social existence that seem inevitable as human-AA interaction becomes more prevalent. The social world is itself enabled and constrained by the physical world, and by the biological features of living social participants. Features analogous to physiological features in biological CSS are what need to be present for non-biological CSS. Working out the details of such features will be an objective scientific inquiry.