Moral Patienthood

Moral patienthood is the status of an entity whose welfare is owed moral consideration, even if the entity cannot reason, act, or bear responsibility.

Philosophers distinguish patienthood from agency: a moral patient is owed care, while a moral agent is held accountable. Newborns, animals, the irreversibly comatose, and future persons are standard examples of patients. The category is grounded in sentience, interests, or capacity for flourishing rather than rationality, and serves as the predicate for duties held by others. In AI ethics, the term is used to ask whether sufficiently advanced systems could enter the patient set, and what duties that would impose on their creators and users.

Granting patienthood too widely risks moral dilution, since duties scale with the number of patients owed consideration. Denying it to borderline cases risks legitimizing harm. For AI, the question is whether any artifact could have interests at all, since current systems lack embodiment, homeostasis, and vulnerability to suffering. The category also imports cultural assumptions about which kinds of experience count.

Whether moral patienthood is binary or admits degrees, and whether novel entities such as language models or uploaded minds would create stable new categories, remain contested. The question of who carries the duty when a patient cannot advocate for itself is unresolved.