Adrià Moret

Which beings have moral status? This chapter argues that moral status requires some capacity for hedonic feelings of pleasure or displeasure. David Chalmers rejects this view on the grounds that it denies moral status to Vulcans, which are defined as conscious creatures with no capacity for hedonic feelings. On his more inclusive view, all conscious beings have moral status. Both views agree that only conscious beings have moral status, but they disagree about how to explain this. This chapter argues that we cannot explain why consciousness is necessary for moral status without denying that it is sufficient for moral status. Hence, we cannot exclude unconscious zombies without excluding conscious Vulcans too.

In their article ‘AI Alignment: The Case for Including Animals’, Tse et al. compellingly argue for extending alignment endeavours beyond humans to also protect sentient animals. They call for AI alignment with a ‘basic’ level of animal welfare. Since ‘basic’ alignment carries minimal human cost, they argue, it can be widely accepted and is thus currently more strategically appropriate than is pursuing advanced or ideal alignment with animal welfare. This commentary paper argues that ‘basic’ AI alignment for animals is sometimes insufficient. It makes the case that going beyond basic AI-animal alignment is both feasible and morally required in a variety of circumstances.

This paper introduces sentientist political liberalism. Elaborating on the fundamental ideas in John Rawls's political liberalism, we propose that the scheme of fair social cooperation among persons should be understood as embedded within a broader system of social coexistence between persons and other sentient beings. This prompts a revision of the original position: We add a second phase in which participants, acting as trustees for animals, deliberate on principles of fair coexistence. We also extend the idea of public justification to include a duty of diligent trusteeship and the permissibility to appeal to comprehensive doctrines to reform anthropocentric political cultures.

I motivate the systematic study of artificial affect by arguing that its possibility has significant intellectual, practical, and ethical implications. I argue the extant consciousness-centric approaches fail to address these implications, while behavioral approaches to AI sentience fail to address the inherent gaming problem in behavioral approaches to AI mentality. In place of these approaches, I propose a functional approach focusing on the roles that affective states play within a cognitive economy. I exemplify this approach with the case of bodily pain by examining its constituent sensory, evaluative, and motivational functions. This analysis establishes the tractability of a functional approach to artificial pain while also highlighting several outstanding questions that must be answered before we can settle the question whether artificial pain is possible in near-future AI systems.

Longtermism should not be wrongly defined as the view that we should act so that the future is as good as possible for human beings and their descendants; rather, longtermists should be concerned with what the long-term future may be like for all sentient beings. This includes nonhuman animals, as different risks of future suffering may afflict them. Indifference toward their interests could lead to the worsening of their use as resources, quantitatively and qualitatively. It could also help expand wild animal suffering, a process that may have already begun.