The Moral Circle

The Moral Circle asks a deceptively simple question: who counts? Jeff Sebo argues that moral concern should not stop at the boundaries of the familiar. Instead, it should expand outward—to nonhuman animals, ecosystems, and potentially artificial intelligences—especially where uncertainty about sentience exists.

For American Cyborg, July reframed intelligence as a moral problem rather than a technical one. Sebo’s work insists that waiting for certainty before acting ethically often guarantees harm. His precautionary approach resonated with a year shaped by AI: when systems act faster than our understanding, responsibility must widen, not narrow.

July became a month about inclusion under uncertainty. The reader was asked to consider care as a default posture—not because every entity is proven to matter in the same way, but because exclusion carries irreversible cost.