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sentience) will be created, or are at least theoretically possible (see, for example, Thompson, 1965 Aleksander, 1996 Buttazzo, 2001 Blackmore, 1999 Franklin, 2003 Harnad, 2003 Holland, 2007 Chrisley, 2008 Seth, 2009 Haikonen, 2012 Bringsjord et al., 2015 Reese, 2018 Anthis and Paez, 2021 Angel, 2019). Scholars often conclude that artificial entities with the capacity for positive and negative experiences (i.e. People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners have explicitly advocated for the moral consideration of artificial entities that can suffer (PETRL, 2015) and The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots have done so for those that are “self-aware” (Anderson, 2015). The moral consideration of artificial entities has also been explored extensively in science fiction (McNally & Inayatullah, 1988, p. Policy decisions relating to the rights of artificial entities have been reported in the media (Browne, 2017 Maza, 2017 Reynolds, 2018 Weller, 2020), discussed by the public, 1 and critiqued by academics (Open Letter, 2018). In the same year, a robot named Sophia was granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia (Hanson Robotics, 2018) and a chatbot on the messaging app Line, named Shibuya Mirai, was granted residence by the city of Tokyo in Japan (Microsoft Asia News Center, 2017). The European Parliament passed a resolution in 2017 suggesting the creation of “a specific legal status for robots in the long run, so that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons” (European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs, 2017). Paro, a type of care robot in the shape of a seal, was granted a “koseki” (household registry) in Nanto, Japan in 2010 (Robertson, 2014).
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South Korea proposed a “robot ethics charter” in 2007 (Yoon-mi, 2010). Office of Science argued that robots could be granted rights within 50 years (BBC, 2006). Policy-makers have begun to engage with this question. Their increasing numbers and ubiquity raise an important question of moral consideration.
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Further breakthroughs in artificial intelligence or space exploration may facilitate a vast proliferation of artificial entities (Reese, 2018 Baum et al., 2019 Anthis and Paez, 2021 Bostrom, 2003). Simulations are used for entertainment (Granic et al., 2014), military training (Cioppa et al., 2004), and scientific research (Terstappen & Reggiani, 2001).
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Robots manufacture goods (Shneier & Bostelman, 2015), care for the elderly (van Wynsberghe, 2013), and manage our homes (Young et al., 2009). Recent decades have seen a substantial increase in human interaction with artificial entities. This suggests an important gap for psychological, sociological, economic, and organizational research on how artificial entities will be integrated into society and the factors that will determine how the interests of artificial entities are considered. There is limited relevant empirical data collection, primarily in a few psychological studies on current moral and social attitudes of humans towards robots and other artificial entities. Beyond the conventional consequentialist, deontological, and virtue ethicist ethical frameworks, some scholars encourage “information ethics” and “social-relational” approaches, though there are opportunities for more in-depth ethical research on the nuances of moral consideration of artificial entities. The reasoning varies, such as concern for the effects on artificial entities and concern for the effects on human society. There is widespread agreement among scholars that some artificial entities could warrant moral consideration in the future, if not also the present. We identify 294 relevant research or discussion items in our literature review of this topic. There is little synthesis of the research on this topic so far. Ethicists, policy-makers, and the general public have questioned whether artificial entities such as robots warrant rights or other forms of moral consideration.