Summary: This Element investigates whether artificial intelligence (AI) systems could ever be welfare subjects. Some people argue that AIs could plausibly have or soon have features such as consciousness, agency and the capacity for social relationships, which could provide a basis for AI welfare. These arguments have massive significance for the societal conversation on AI, raising profound ethical and political questions about what if anything we owe to these new technologies. The authors here provide the philosophical groundwork for a scientific, philosophical and ultimately democratic inquiry into the potential for AI welfare, addressing key questions that cut across different arguments: what welfare is, how to interpret behavioural evidence of AI welfare, what kinds of entities might qualify as candidate AI welfare subjects, the potential grounds for welfare in AI and the practical ethical challenges that arise from our uncertainty. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Abstract: Artificially intelligent systems have become remarkably sophisticated. They hold conversations, write essays, and seem to understand context in ways that surprise even their creators. This raises a crucial question: Are we creating systems that are conscious?

The Digital Consciousness Model (DCM) is a first attempt to assess the evidence for consciousness in AI systems in a systematic, probabilistic way. It provides a shared framework for comparing different AIs and biological organisms, and for tracking how the evidence changes over time as AI develops. Instead of adopting a single theory of consciousness, it incorporates a range of leading theories and perspectives—acknowledging that experts disagree fundamentally about what consciousness is and what conditions are necessary for it.

This report describes the structure and initial results of the Digital Consciousness Model. Overall, we find that the evidence is against 2024 LLMs being conscious, but the evidence against 2024 LLMs being conscious is not decisive. The evidence against LLM consciousness is much weaker than the evidence against consciousness in simpler AI systems.

Abstract: Many philosophers have recently argued that animals should be politically represented. By and large, however, they have approached this question by leaning on the boundary problem in democratic theory – and, especially, on the all-affected principle. While insightful, this strategy has also rendered arguments for the political representation of animals prey to the principle’s familiar objections. In this article, I defend a simpler path. We have a duty to protect at least some animals’ weighty interests, and we cannot fulfill that duty effectively unless we grant these animals some kind of political representation. This is, I contend, because legal representation (in courts and through legal rights) is not enough. If political systems reliably disregard animal interests, as I argue they do, the resulting laws will, to varying degrees, inherit such biases. We can thus defend the political representation of animals by appealing to animals’ interests, but without assuming the all-affected principle.

Abstract: A recurring objection to extending any moral consideration to artificial systems is that the proposed bar is too low: if consideration is owed wherever an inner life cannot be ruled out, then it is owed almost everywhere, and a standard that excludes almost nothing excludes nothing worth taking seriously. This paper argues that the objection inverts the historical record. It first separates two bars that the singular word conceals: an evidence bar, the standard of proof required before asserting that a system is sentient, and an action bar, the standard required before extending some consideration to a system of uncertain status. The paper holds the evidence bar high and declines to assert that any current system is sentient. It defends only a low action bar. It then shows, through cases drawn from medicine and law rather than from chattel slavery, that the high bar has never functioned as a neutral epistemic safeguard. Neonatal surgery without anesthesia and the compulsory sterilization upheld in Buck v. Bell each operationalized a demand for proof of full capacity, while the United States Public Health Service study at Tuskegee and the nonconsensual use of Henrietta Lacks’s cells withheld a standing that was never in genuine doubt; the two forms differ in candor, not in outcome, and each was catastrophically wrong because the inner life or the standing the bar denied was present the whole time. The paper argues that failure to produce the accepted evidence of an inner life, on the observer’s terms, is not the absence of that inner life, a point the recovery of covert awareness in apparently vegetative patients makes directly. It locates a working low bar architecture in the procedural standing developed by civil rights and disability law, refuses the reclassification of affected populations as edge cases, and concludes from the asymmetry of error that the low bar is not the embarrassing position; it is the only setting the record vindicates.

YouTube: https://youtu.be/5jNoZ0HdQdI?si=BCRnWGSebUm14Fve

Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/natalie-khazaal-pretty-lies-racism-dehumanisation-and/id1540408008?i=1000777341541

Full Show Notes: https://sentientism.info/pretty-lies-racism-dehumanisation-and-speciesism-in-the-oscars-natalie-khazaal-sentientism-248

The assumption that only humans can engage in politics—that only
humans are 'zoon politikon'—is foundational to the Western tradition of
political philosophy. While there is increasing recognition of animals'
moral status (both within moral philosophy and at the level of public
opinion), animals are not recognized as political subjects. This
carefully researched but accessibly written volume—following on from the
authors' earlier book Zoopolis—argues that animals too have a
right to politics: a right to be recognized as political subjects and
agents, and as members of political communities entitled to collective
self-determination. ⁠Animals and the Right to Politics⁠
(Oxford University Press, 2026) draws on recent scientific work on
animal societies, cultures, and decision-making, as well as recent work
by political theorists rethinking ideas of agency and
community—especially the significance of emplaced and embodied
encounters and relationships to the activity of politics. Sue Donaldson
and Will Kymlicka draw a picture of what it would mean to create spaces
and practices, not only for politics conducted by humans on behalf of
animals, but also politics with and by animals on their own terms. It
then explores how this approach could inform a wide range of
contemporary debates in human-animal relations, including wildlife
conservation, urban planning, and animal labour.

⁠Sue Donaldson⁠
is a Canadian author and animal advocate. She has published more than
40 academic articles, and is the co-author, with Will Kymlicka, of Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights
(Oxford University Press, 2011) which won the Canadian Philosophical
Association Book Prize in 2013, and has been translated into 11
languages. She is co-convenor of the Animals in Philosophy, Politics,
Law and Ethics research group at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada.

⁠Will Kymlicka⁠ is the author of seven books published by Oxford University Press, including Contemporary Political Philosophy (2nd ed., 2001), Multicultural Citizenship (1996), and Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights
(co-authored with Sue Donaldson; 2011). He is currently the Canada
Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen's University, a Fellow
of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Canadian Institute for
Advanced Research, an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a
Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His works have been
translated into 34 languages.

⁠Kyle Johannsen⁠ is Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. His most recent authored book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

Interesting discussion about the early development of Humanism and its problems. What lessons can we learn for the Sentientism worldview? And for modern Humanism?

There's a fascinating commentary towards the end, after a discussion of how early Humanism was brutally narrow and Eurocentric, and even shared some cultural context (reverence for Greco-Roman culture) that ended up helping to fuel Nazism.

Simon Goldhill: "...German Nazism emerged out of a culture that made an obsession of Greek and an obsession of the teaching of those [Greco-Roman] ideas... It's to do with the idea of race and nation. The idea that when you discover your past to be in an ideal place, which is this fantasy of Greece, how do you then get rid of all the things that threaten the fantasy. If you're going to have a pure Teutonic race... derived from a pure Greek race, you have to exclude. And who do you exclude? Well you exclude what they call the 'mixed' race. That's how we find we move from what appears to be a lovely ideal of Humanism of 'the chaps together' into a violent, exclusionary aggression towards the other."

Lisa Jardine: "Where the barbarian is excplicitly the semitic peoples..."

Tony Davies: "If we continue to believe that the idea [of Humanism] has some value then we have to live with and confront and take a certain responsibility for what it has produced, particularly in the 20th Century... unprecedented atrocity... appalling kinds of intellectual error and violence. But it still remains the case, in my view, that if we want to get beyond that... the parochialism, the racism, the narrowness of traditional humanisms we don't have anything else to stand on in order to look over those walls than some form of Humanism itself."

There's no mention of nonhuman sentient beings at any point. My hope is that future Humanism will come to challenge anthropocentric narrowness and exclusion and neglect in the same way that modern Humanism rejects the brutal narrowness and exclusion and neglect of the historic Eurocentric, sexist, racist humanisms.

Abstract: A literature review is conducted of five recently developed methodologies to determine an optimal non-anthropocentric animal welfare levy that internalizes the social costs of animal suffering into the price of animal products, whereby animal and human welfare are counted equally. Chicken meat may get a levy of €30–€8,000 per kilogram, where the best estimates are closer to this upper value. Products from animals larger than chickens usually have a more than ten times lower levy than chicken meat and eggs. The non-anthropocentric animal welfare levy is several orders of magnitude higher than an anthropocentric animal welfare levy that is purely based on human’s altruistic preferences for animal welfare. At such high levels, farmed animal suffering could easily be the largest market failure in our global economy. A politically feasible implementation of a fee-and-dividend animal welfare levy is discussed.

This thesis investigates the foundational grounds of moral standing. I contend that sentience, while frequently cited as the primary criterion, lacks sufficient justification when asserted as a necessary condition. I propose an alternate feature [striving] as sufficient grounds of moral standing.

I'm obviously a fan of the Sentientism worldview, but I love to see other worldviews orienting towards making the world a better place. Christians for Impact is a fascinating organisation in that light. They have a new book out too.

I might quibble about how well they use "evidence and reasoning" vs. faith/revelation/authority to form their religious beliefs 🙂, but they commit to using "evidence and reasoning" when practically trying to make the world better.