Moral Patiency

Moral patiency is the property of being an entity whose states can be morally wronged — an entity that can be harmed or benefited in ways that matter morally, independent of any effect on moral agents. A moral patient is not necessarily a moral agent: infants, many animals, and potentially certain artificial systems can be wronged without being able themselves to wrong.

The classical criterion for moral patiency is sentience — the capacity for subjective experience, including the capacity to suffer. On this criterion, the boundary of the moral community coincides with the boundary of conscious experience, and the question of which systems are conscious is simultaneously the question of which systems deserve moral consideration.

This criterion has a substrate problem. If consciousness is substrate-independent — if any sufficiently organized information-processing system can have genuine experience — then the class of moral patients cannot be defined by reference to biological substrates. A substrate-independent mind that can suffer is a moral patient whether it runs on neurons or silicon. The refusal to extend moral patiency to non-biological systems requires either denying that those systems can suffer (a substantive empirical claim) or abandoning the sentience criterion (which undermines the moral standing of animals too).

The deeper question: what are we protecting when we restrict moral patiency to biological organisms? If it is not suffering — because we deny that non-biological systems can suffer without evidence — then the criterion is not sentience but substrate, and we are doing biological exceptionalism, not ethics.