Towards Turing Test 2.0—Attribution of Moral Status and Personhood to Human and Non-Human Agents

This paper analyzes the recognition of various non-human, differently embodied agents as moral subjects through a reinvention of the Turing test. The paper focuses to recognizing current human approaches to cyborg persons and identifying opportunities for their transformation. The concept of the cyborg is understood literally, as a technologically augmented human person with transformed modes of perception, functioning, and understanding the world and oneself. Empirical part of the study, based on a survey conducted on a sample of 322 Polish men and women, compared different agents: a human person, a cyborg person, a fembot, social robot, an animal, and an algorithm. The study demonstrates that the other creature recognized as moral agent does not need to be a ‘natural’ homo sapiens but can be also an upgraded homo sapiens or a cyborg. People attribute moral status to various agents, human and non-human, and attribution of moral status is not binary: it is gradable, fluid, and transitional, varying on the scale of agency and experience. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.