CONCEPT
Relational Moral Status
Mark Coeckelbergh’s argument that moral status is not a hidden property inside an entity—sentience, consciousness, rationality—but something that emerges between entities in relation, making the ethical question about AI one of encounter and practice rather than metaphysical discovery.
The conventional approach to moral status treats it as a property: an entity either has the relevant feature—sentience, the capacity to suffer, rational agency—or it does not, and our obligations follow once we have established which applies. On this view the great question about robots and AI is whether they have the property, which requires settling a metaphysical question about inner life that current science cannot answer.
Coeckelbergh’s relational alternative argues that this whole framework is built on a mistake. Moral status, he contends, is not a property discovered by inspection but something that emerges between entities in relation—in how we stand toward the thing, how it stands toward us, what we do together. We do not first establish that another being is conscious and then, on the strength of that proof, extend it moral regard. We encounter the other already as a claim on us, in its responsiveness, its presence within our shared form of