---
title: "Machine ethics"
chunk: 4/7
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_ethics"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:23:37.276938+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

"Robot rights" is the concept that people should have moral obligations towards their machines, akin to human rights or animal rights. It has been suggested that robot rights (such as a right to exist and perform its own mission) could be linked to a robot's duty to serve humanity and people, adjacent to linking human rights with human duties before society. One question is whether copyright ownership may be claimed. This has been considered by the Institute for the Future and the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry.
In October 2017, an android, Sophia, was granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia, and while some considered this more a publicity stunt than meaningful legal recognition, others saw it as openly denigrating human rights and the rule of law. Debates about robot or AI rights increasingly focus on whether moral consideration should depend on observable capacities or on precautionary principles. Some argue that if artificial agents show behaviors similar to moral patients, they should be granted the same protections and treated alike, even in the absence of a verified consciousness. Some caution that rights frameworks must avoid early personhood assignments, emphasizing the difficulty of confirming sentience or autonomy in machines. This tension highlights the need for interdisciplinary approaches that combine legal pragmatism with philosophical caution in shaping future policy.
Joanna Bryson has argued that creating AI that requires rights is both easily avoidable, and would in itself be unintelligent, both as a burden to the AI agents and to human society.
In their article "Debunking robot rights metaphysically, ethically, and legally", Birhane, van Dijk, and Pasquale argue that the attribution of rights to robots lacks metaphysical, ethical, and legal grounds. Robots lack consciousness and subjective experience and therefore cannot be considered sentient entities. Ethically, the concept of rights presupposes vulnerability and capacity for suffering, characteristics absent in artificial artifacts. Legally, recognizing the persoonhood of AI and robots generates normative ambiguities and relieves humans of their responsibilities. The authors suggest that the focus should not be on robot rights but on how technologies affect social relations and systems of power.

=== Legal and political debates about robot rights ===
The possibility that artificial agents could be granted some form of legal personhood has sparked major debate among scholars. Legal and political theorists usually frame this as a conditional: if robots or AI systems acquired consciousness, sentience, or robust autonomy, their moral and legal status would need to change. On this view, machines are currently being used as property or tools, but more advanced systems could challenge distinctions between persons and property. 
Another perspective handles robot rights as an extension of general debates about who or what can have rights. On this view, rights are connected not to biology but to functional capacities, such as the ability to feel, reason, and form preferences; robot or AI systems that share these capacities with rights-bearing entities could, in principle, be eligible for similar protections. Proponents often connect this perspective to past legal developments in which groups previously regarded as non-rights-holders came to be included.
Another major component of the debate focuses on legal personhood as a technical category rather than a synonym for humanity. Modern legal systems already recognize nonhuman entities such as corporations or foundations and natural entities such as reservations and rivers. Scholars argue that law can recognize certain robot and AI systems as legal persons if doing so would serve a clear function, such as upholding a contract. In this scenario, these rights need not resemble full human rights but could take specialized forms fitted to particular agents and their roles.
Another area of debate focuses on how a robot can be held responsible for its actions if it does not make decisions on its own. A judge can order a person to do or refrain from an action, but robots cannot comply with orders not written in computer code.

=== Ethical principles ===
In the review of 84 ethics guidelines for AI, 11 clusters of principles were found: transparency, justice and fairness, non-maleficence, responsibility, privacy, beneficence, freedom and autonomy, trust, sustainability, dignity, and solidarity.
Luciano Floridi and Josh Cowls created an ethical framework of AI principles set by four principles of bioethics (beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy and justice) and an additional AI enabling principle – explicability.