Earning Their Rights! Ontological Properties, Social Impact, and Moral Rights for Artificial Intelligence

What entities deserve moral rights? Although this question has been of long-standing interest to ethics and social theory, it has resurfaced in a particularly pronounced way with artificial intelligence (AI). Using original survey data from a convenience sample and a large-scale random sample of Switzerland, we compare two explanations for the willingness to grant moral rights to AI. The ontological view refers to perceived human-like properties of AI, such as sentience (i.e., what AI is). The social impact view refers to the social-relational meaning of AI in terms of its impact on humans and trust (i.e., what AI does). The findings corroborate both views. Support for the general idea of AI rights and a political referendum granting basic rights to AI are positively correlated with the perceived ontological proximity of AI to humans, expected benefits of AI for society, and trust in AI developers. A right to life and physical integrity rests on perceived ontological properties only. Ontological distance of AI to simple computer programs, expected costs of AI, and trust in the state play a minor or no role. Sociological perspectives on an entity’s social-relational meaning are hence indispensable to explain the social construction of moral rights for AI.