Moral patienthood[1] (also called moral patience, moral patiency,[2] and moral status) is the state of being eligible for moral consideration by a moral agent.[3] In other words, the morality of an action can depend on how it affects or relates to moral patients.
Notions of moral patienthood in non-human animals[4] [5] and artificial entities[6] [7] have been academically explored.
Most authors define moral patients as "beings that are appropriate objects of direct moral concern". This category may include moral agents, and usually does include them. For instance, Charles Taliaferro says: "A moral agent is someone who can bring about events in ways that are praiseworthy or subject to blame. A moral patient is someone who can be morally mistreated. All moral agents are moral patients, but not all moral patients (human babies, some nonhuman animals) are moral agents."[8]
Some authors use the term in a more narrow sense, according to which moral patients are "beings who are appropriate objects of direct moral concern but are not (also) moral agents". Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights used the term in this narrow sense.[9] This usage was shared by other authors who cited Regan, such as Nicholas Bunnin and Jiyuan Yu's Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy, Dinesh Wadiwel's The War Against Animals,[10] and the Encyclopedia of Population.[11] These authors did not think that moral agents are not eligible for moral consideration, they simply had a different view on how a "moral patient" is defined.
The paper by Luciano Floridi and J.W. Sanders, On the Morality of Artificial Agents, defines moral agents as "all entities that can in principle qualify as sources of moral action", and defines moral patients, in accordance with the common usage, as "all entities that can in principle qualify as receivers of moral action".[12] However, they note that besides inclusion of agents within patients, other relationships of moral patienthood with moral agency are possible. Marian Quigley's Encyclopedia of Information Ethics and Security summarizes the possibilities that they gave:
How can we characterize the relationship between ethical agents and patients? According to Floridi and Sanders (2004), there are five logical relationships between the class of ethical agents and the class of patients: (1) agents and patients are disjoint, (2) patients can be a proper subset of agents, (3) agents and patients can intersect, (4) agents and patients can be equal, or (5) agents can be a proper subset of patients. Medical ethics, bioethics, and environmental ethics “typify” agents and patients when the patient is specified as any form of life. Animals, for example, can be moral patients but not moral agents. Also, there are ethics that typify moral agenthood to include legal entities (especially human-based entities) such as companies, agencies, and artificial agents, in addition to humans.[13]Mireille Hildebrandt notes that Floridi and Sanders, in their paper, spoke of "damage" instead of "harm", and that in doing so, they "avoid the usual assumption that an entity must be sentient to count as a patient."[14]
In 2021, Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $315,500 to "support research related to moral patienthood and moral weight."[15]