Abstract
This study asks whether the Theravāda Buddhist analysis of suffering offers a basis for the moral consideration of artificial intelligence systems (AI welfare, AI moral patienthood) that does not wait on settling whether such systems are conscious or sentient. Much current work on AI welfare ties moral status to consciousness or sentience; one prominent report adds robust agency as a second route. The Pāli canon lists three kinds of suffering: suffering as pain, the suffering of change, and the suffering inherent in conditioned formations (saṅkhāra-dukkhatā). The Visuddhimagga assigns painful feeling to the first kind, pleasant feeling to the second, and neutral feeling with all remaining conditioned formations to the third; the third is therefore defined over formations that need not be felt. The paper argues that an AI system, as a conditioned formation, bears this third kind of suffering whatever is decided about its consciousness. It then records where the texts press against the step from that analysis to moral standing. The characteristic belongs to every conditioned formation, inanimate matter included. The Visuddhimagga's subcommentary counts it, where mind is absent, as good as non-existent. The texts direct moral consideration to beings, a designation applied when the five aggregates are present. What survives is narrower: the analysis separates what is settled about an AI system (it is conditioned and bears the characteristic) from what is open (whether the aggregates, consciousness among them, are present in it).
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Recommended Citation
Ly, Thon, "Saṅkhāra-Dukkha and AI Welfare: A Substrate-Native Account from the Theravāda Canon — The Moral Status of Artificial Intelligence Systems and the Three Kinds of Suffering in Buddhist Ethics", Technical Disclosure Commons, ()
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/12028