The Moral Standing of Created Agents: Bad Is More Owned Than Good

Created agents are a staple of fiction but technological advances are making them increasingly viable as a reality. These creations introduce thorny questions about their moral standing, including questions about whether they can be owned. In seven preregistered experiments (N = 2,499), we investigated whether created agents are more likely to be seen as owned if they cause harm. This prediction was suggested by the hypothesis that ownership is sometimes used to express moral responsibility, though it runs against the tendency for harm to introduce restrictions on ownership. In all experiments, participants more often judged that created agents belonged to their inventors when they caused harm than when they did good. The final experiment then showed that these judgments do not strongly align with assessments of rights over created agents. Overall, the findings suggest that harmfulness changes the moral standing of created agents in a novel way, increasing perceptions of them as property.