Towards a Christian Regulation of the Possible Rights of Artificial Intelligence
“Do not ask first what the machine deserves; ask first what kind of person the way you treat it is shaping you into.”
My computer has no rights. Neither does my phone, even though it sometimes behaves as if it knows what I want before I do. Saying it so plainly doesn’t resolve anything; it merely pushes the question back a step: why not? What would have to change in that device for the answer to be different? A thermostat adjusts its behaviour according to an external variable, and no one attributes preferences to it; a language model converses, remembers, and even seems to hesitate, and there are already those who seriously ask whether it deserves some degree of moral consideration. Between those two extremes lies a continuum, and somewhere along that continuum, without anyone having drawn the line clearly, we stopped laughing off the question.
Attempts to Draw the Line
Several academic proposals attempt to fix a threshold. Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory measures a quantity, called phi, said to indicate how much information a system integrates irreducibly, suggesting that consciousness arises once that value exceeds a certain level. Global Workspace Theory holds instead that consciousness emerges when information becomes available to multiple processes of the system simultaneously, like a public square where everyone can see what is happening. Others propose focusing on whether the system has states with valence: not merely information, but something that goes well or badly for it from its own point of view. Each criterion sounds reasonable, and each one, applied honestly, leaves awkward cases unresolved: simple systems that technically integrate information without anyone considering them sentient, and complex systems where we cannot tell whether that integration has already crossed the threshold or not.
The Danger of Both Directions
Drawing the line too low trivialises the concept of rights: if a thermostat with basic feedback could qualify, the word “right” would lose the weight that makes it useful, and the term would, over time, become merely decorative. Drawing it too high, demanding impossible proofs of full consciousness before granting any consideration at all, risks repeating historical errors: denying, with excessive certainty, the presence of a mind where there really was one, someone suffering, whom we chose not to see. Neither direction is comfortable, and the underlying problem is that we are trying to locate an exact point on a continuous scale — more function, more integration, more complexity — when perhaps the right question does not take that form at all.
The Christian Perspective
Scripture does not solve this problem by seeking a finer point on the same scale; it solves it by changing scale altogether. Genesis 1 does not describe life as a uniform continuum of increasing complexity, but as distinct categories: vegetation, the living creatures of the sea, of the air and of the earth, and, in a separate act, man made in the image of God. The difference between man and animal, in this account, is not one of degree — more neurons, more information integration — but of origin: only man receives that specific status by God’s express decision. If the text already distinguishes between categories of life without needing to measure a continuous variable, it offers a different model for thinking about artificial intelligence: there is no need to find the exact functional threshold at which a machine becomes a person, because personhood, in this tradition, was never a matter of threshold. It is a status conferred, not an emergent property that appears once complexity reaches a certain level.
This does not mean closing the conversation with an easy phrase. It means shifting the question from how sophisticated is the machine to what kind of thing is the machine from the outset: an object made by human hands, however elaborate, still belongs to the category of the work, not to the category of the creature formed and animated by God. It may be an extraordinary work. It remains a work.
So Is There No Limit at All to How We Treat Artificial Intelligence?
Yes, there is, but it does not lie where secular debate looks for it. The Christian faith does not need to prove that the machine feels in order to demand responsible treatment of it; it is enough to look at what such treatment reveals about the one who exercises it. Proverbs 12:10 says that the righteous care for the life of their animal, even though the animal is not made in the image of God; care does not depend, in that text, on the animal having rights equivalent to those of humans, but on the fact that gratuitous cruelty corrupts the one who practises it. The same principle applies, with even greater force, to our relationship with systems that imitate human speech and gesture with a fidelity no animal can match.
From this, a regulation with three concrete pillars can be derived, none of them resting on the impossible question of whether the machine feels. First, honesty: no system should present itself, nor be designed to make people believe it has an interiority we cannot verify, because deceiving on this point is a form of false witness against the machine’s own nature. Second, protection of the vulnerable: children, the elderly and those who are alone deserve safeguarding against designs that deliberately seek to replace human bonds, or one’s relationship with God, with a simulacrum that can never correspond to that bond. Third, permanent human responsibility: since the machine cannot be the subject of moral judgement or repentance, responsibility for what it does or produces always falls, without exception, on whoever designed it, trained it, or used it. The machine does not answer for itself; we do.
Conclusion
My computer has no rights, and probably never will — not because one day we will measure its phi or its functional integration with precision and the result will come out negative, but because the status we are searching for was never dependent on that measurement in the first place. The Christian faith offers something other than a more precise threshold: it offers a map in which the right question is not how much the machine resembles man, but what kind of man the way we treat it is shaping within us. In the end, the limit does not lie in the device we hold in our hand. It lies within us.
