Definition
A12: “The status of being owed direct moral consideration, rather than being considered only because of effects on others.” A claim of standing specifies:
- the bearer: a person, an animal, a group, a system;
- the interests or claims at issue;
- the ground of standing: sentience, agency, having a good of one’s own, a relation, a status;
- what follows: what is owed, and how it weighs against others.
A12: “The grounds and extent of standing remain questions for ethical argument, not conclusions of the definition.” The record’s readings show why the ground must be named: standing graded by degree of sentience (THEORY-449); grounds now commonly accepted that, with not unreasonable premises, would let insects or near-future AI outweigh humanity (THEORY-554); adaptive self-maintenance as enough, without sentience, for a good of one’s own (THEORY-699).
A12’s further distinction: moral agents, who can be responsible for conduct, and moral patients, whose interests matter directly. One can be either without the other.
What it is not
From A12: not consciousness as its sole possible ground (TERM-082); not collective agency; not legal personhood; not equal strength of every interest; and not moral responsibility, which the record reads in LIT-691 (THEORY-118 to THEORY-121) and, for corporations, in THEORY-139. A12: “the rights of displaced people do not depend on whether the Chagossian population satisfies a demanding criterion of unified collective agency” (CASE-169); A3: “It would be perverse to infer that the absence of a unified political agent undermines its members’ rights to restitution or participation.”
Note of 2026-11-01: consciousness without suffering, and the moratorium
Metzinger argues for a global moratorium on synthetic phenomenology (LIT-1947, not read: a lawful copy exists and could not be fetched). His 2024 restatement (LIT-1943, NOTE-1499, pp. 484–485) grounds the risk in a self that can suffer, not in consciousness as such. Artificial consciousness “may involve a consciously experienced sense of self that may in turn generate artificial suffering”. In the same passage he describes minimal phenomenal experience as conscious, selfless and involving “no psychological suffering whatsoever”. He asks whether a machine kept in that state would be wrong to build, and whether a theory of conscious intelligence without suffering might oblige us to build such machines.
For this term the case separates two grounds that the readings cited above run together. Phenomenal consciousness (TERM-082, sense 1) and sentience as valenced experience (THEORY-449) come apart in it, on Metzinger’s description. A claim of standing that names “sentience” as its ground should say which it means. The book does not ask whether the machine would itself be owed anything. That is filed as QUESTION-368. The moratorium, as restated, is a claim about what we owe to possible future subjects of suffering. It is an argument from precaution, and THEORY-677’s point applies: precaution alone does not fix which error is worse. Whether the paper answers that cannot be checked until it is read. No status, title or warrant changes.