Yosef B., Moran: The Criterion of Loss: Why AI Cannot Yet Be a Moral Subject

This essay argues that artificial intelligence systems cannot yet be treated as moral subjects, and that the decisive criterion for moral subjecthood is the capacity for irreversible loss — that is, the capacity for a being to lose something of its own in a way that matters to it. Drawing on this criterion, the essay distinguishes between functional agency and moral presence, critiques the widespread conflation of scale with threshold in AI discourse, and identifies the human withdrawal from res