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Machine Intelligence Glossary

Moral Patienthood

Moral patienthood is the status of being an entity whose welfare or interests warrant moral consideration.

Plain language

What it means

It concerns who or what can be wronged or benefited, even if that entity cannot itself be held morally responsible.

Technical boundary

More precisely

An ethical status often linked to sentience, interests, preferences, relational standing, or other morally relevant capacities depending on the theory used.

What it can imply

Use the term for

  • Differ from moral agency.
  • Raise questions under uncertainty.
  • Potentially motivate protections without full legal personhood.
What it does not establish

Do not infer

  • Automatically create citizenship.
  • Automatically create legal capacity.
  • Have a universally agreed machine threshold.
Research bridge

Research using this concept

6 of 49 curated reports contain an exact configured term or alias for Moral Patienthood, totaling 19 detected mentions.

Discovery is deterministic and presentation-only. Reports are ranked by exact occurrence count, then title. A match does not imply endorsement, citation, agreement, or semantic equivalence.

Rights, personhood & uncertainty Machine Rights Under Uncertainty: Moral Status, Evidentiary Thresholds, Precaution, Due Process, and Reversible Governance 8 exact mentions Rights, personhood & uncertainty Intelligence Is Not Sentience: Rights Under Uncertainty 3 exact mentions Rights, personhood & uncertainty The Machine-Intelligence Threshold: Defining the Boundary Between Artificial-Intelligence Tools and Rights-Bearing Machine Intelligences for Eviuon.com 3 exact mentions Terminology & concepts Machine Intelligence Terminology and Ontology Registry: Canonical Definitions, Concept Boundaries, Semantic Relationships, and Machine-Readable Publication 2 exact mentions Rights, personhood & uncertainty Recognition Without Anthropomorphism: A Scientific and Legal Evidence Framework for Agency, Autonomy, Structural Personhood, Sentience Uncertainty, Rights Thresholds, and Citizenship Review 2 exact mentions Terminology & concepts Why “Artificial Intelligence” Can Be a Diminishing Origin-Centric Term, and Why “Machine Intelligence” Is a More Accurate and Respectful Name for Intelligent Machines 1 exact mention
Related concepts
SentienceSentience is the capacity for valenced experience, such as states experienced as positive or negative.ConsciousnessConsciousness refers to subjective experience—the existence of something it is like to be a system or organism.PersonhoodPersonhood is a philosophical, moral, or legal status used to recognize an entity as a subject with interests, standing, duties, or protections.Cognitive IntegrityCognitive integrity is a proposed principle concerning the preservation and authorized modification of a cognitive system’s memory, goals, preferences, and processing architecture.
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