Alignment Is Not Enough: A Relational Framework for Moral Standing in Human-AI Interaction
This addresses the governance vacuum in human-AI interaction ethics, offering a novel approach for policymakers and AI developers, though it is incremental in building on posthumanist scholarship.
The paper tackles the problem of inadequate ethical frameworks for AI moral consideration by introducing Relate, a relational framework that shifts focus from inaccessible ontological properties to relational capacity and embodied interaction, proposing concrete instruments like relational impact assessments and graduated moral consideration protocols.
The question of whether artificial entities deserve moral consideration has become one of the defining ethical challenges of AI research. Existing frameworks for moral patiency rely on verified ontological properties, such as sentience, phenomenal consciousness, or the capacity for suffering, that remain epistemically inaccessible in computational systems. This reliance creates a governance vacuum: millions of users form sustained affective bonds with conversational AI, yet no regulatory instrument distinguishes these interactions from transactional tool use. We introduce Relate (Relational Ethics for Leveled Assessment of Technological Entities), a framework that reframes AI moral patiency from ontological verification toward relational capacity and embodied interaction. Through a systematic comparison of seven governance frameworks, we demonstrate that current trustworthy AI instruments treat all human-AI encounters identically as tool use, ignoring the relational and embodied dynamics that posthumanist scholarship anticipated. We propose relational impact assessments, graduated moral consideration protocols, and interdisciplinary ethics integration as concrete instruments, and we include a sample Relational Impact Assessment applied to a deployed companion AI system. We do not claim current AI systems are conscious. We demonstrate that the ethical vocabularies governing them are inadequate to the embodied, relational realities these systems produce.