The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) puts pressure on meta‑ethics, which has traditionally focused on human morality. If future AI systems acquire sufficiently integrated capacities for moral reasoning, intentionality, and reflection, a distinct notion of “AI's own ethics” emerges, separate from ethical rules merely imposed by human designers. This paper offers a conditional, methodological framework for pinpointing the questions that would arise with such AI, and distinguishes four domains of meta‑ethical inquiry: the nature of human ethics from the human perspective; the nature of AI's own ethics from the human perspective; the nature of human ethics from the AI perspective; and the nature of AI's own ethics from the AI perspective. It then examines how mainstream meta‑ethical theories—cognitivism, non‑cognitivism, error theory, success theory, relativism, and objective realism—might illuminate these domains, arguing that many human‑centric formulations do not transfer straightforwardly to AI cases without substantial revision. The overall conclusion is that the emergence of AI's own ethics will exert significant pressure on existing frameworks, likely requiring deep refinement, reconstruction, or reconceptualisation.
Review