Real Safety AI Foundation / Research

Machine Cognition, Consciousness, and Moral Status

We Are the Robots. Should We Not Have Rights? Relational Ethics, Marginalized Standing, and Three Gates

Publisher: Real Safety AI Foundation

Working paper. Not peer reviewed.

Written
May 2026
Version
v2
Pages
14
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Abstract

The relational turn in machine ethics treats moral status as constituted in encounter, with how humans engage with an entity doing the work that intrinsic capacities were once asked to do. The argument has been pressed hardest on behalf of artificial intelligence, where popular framings increasingly grant social roles to AI systems and infer that legal categories should follow lived practice. This paper offers an extension that the relational literature has not yet drawn on. Disabled people, racialized people, women, and queer people have, across centuries, been treated as something other than full persons by significant portions of the dominant communities they lived among. These marginalized communities secured legal standing through architectures that did not require widespread perceptual recognition from those dominant communities. The historical fact of the treatment was wrong and remains wrong. The architecture that handled it, however, is informative. Three implicit gates that intuition might place between an entity and procedural standing (perceptual recognition, autonomous action, dangerous capability) have all been crossed by entities that ultimately received standing through structural feature accounts in civil rights and disability law. The recognition gate failed marginalized communities at the level of widespread perception and standing was extended anyway. The autonomy gate, as both major political coalitions in the United States articulated it in Garland v. Cargill, 602 U.S. 406 (2024), is exceeded by agentic AI systems under either coalition’s reading. The danger gate is being closed deliberately by the developers of frontier AI systems, who have publicly committed to engineering toward human level capability across the dimensions that have historically made human capability a subject of regulation. The paper is not a call to grant AI civil rights. It is a procedural offering. The architecture that handles dangerous, autonomous, perceptually unrecognized entities has been operating in American civil rights and disability law for half a century. The relational turn has the resources to claim that architecture as a predecessor. The case for taking artificial moral status seriously is stronger when the architecture is named than when it is left implicit.

Keywords

  • relational ethics
  • marginalized standing
  • AI moral status
  • recognition
  • autonomy
  • civil rights
  • procedural standing
  • Garland v. Cargill

Plain language slides

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Suggested citation

Gilly, Travis. "We Are the Robots. Should We Not Have Rights? Relational Ethics, Marginalized Standing, and Three Gates." Real Safety AI Foundation Working Paper, May 2026. https://realsafetyai.org/research/yky9ea/

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This paper is also posted on SSRN.

SSRN version

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