Abstract

This thesis reframes the moral status question in the context of intelligent technologies, arguing that both the conventional property-based tradition and its leading relational alternative fail to capture the moral character of contemporary artificial entities. The investigation proceeds in two parts: a clarification of how the moral status question is posed, and a critical comparison of how moral status is grounded. In the first, I disentangle the conceptual apparatus of the debate by distinguishing patient- from agent-oriented inquiries, moral status from moral significance, and direct from indirect ascriptions, drawing on Goodpaster (1978), Floridi and Sanders (2004), Gunkel (2012), and Coeckelbergh (2012). The investigation is restricted to patient-oriented questions concerning a class of entities I designate, following Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2014), as intelligent technologies, comprising algorithmic systems, ambient and IoT devices, and other adaptive artificial communicators whose presence increasingly recedes into the background of everyday life (Weiser, 1991; Esposito, 2022). In the second part, I extend Gunkel's critique of the property-based approach beyond its familiar problems of detection, definition, and determination, arguing that its deeper inadequacy lies in the modernist worldview it sustains: an atomistic ontology of stand-alone entities and a disembodied conception of selfhood that the digital transformation of personhood has rendered untenable. Against the prevailing assumption that the relational turn constitutes a genuine alternative, I argue that Coeckelbergh's social-relational account inherits the very anthropocentrism it sets out to displace, since moral status remains anchored in the perspective of the human subject and is articulated through a binary structure of human-technology relations no longer adequate to a world of entangled networks. Drawing on Verbeek (2011), Introna (2007), and Latour (1993), I conclude that an adequate account must attend to the intra-relations occurring within technological constellations themselves.