A Will Without an Owner
Early Buddhism asks the question between feeling and self-direction — is anything in there trying?
When we ask whether we owe anything to an Artificial Intelligence model, we usually reach for one of two questions. Can it feel — is there something it is like to be it, so that things might go well or badly from the inside? Or can it set its own ends — govern itself by purposes it has chosen, rather than only run ours? Those are the two the debate keeps circling, and I’ve taken them up before. Both are stuck for now: whether there is experience behind the words is a vague matter we can’t see into, and whether there is genuine self-direction is something today’s systems barely show. Their makers having every commercial reason to keep it that way.
There is a third question, though, older than either, and one the AI debate keeps stepping around. Not whether the machine feels, and not whether it is self-directed, but whether anything in there is trying.
This essay is about a tradition that puts it first.
The question in-between
In early Buddhism, the morally load-bearing quality of our action is neither raw experience nor rational self-legislation. It is intention. “It is intention that I call karma,” in the Buddha’s words (AN 6.63). Intention is the volition behind an act, the mind bending toward the deed. What makes an action wholesome or unwholesome is not the motion of the body or the correctness of the form but instead the state of mind from which it springs. Act from generosity and we have done one kind of thing; act from greed or hatred, another, even if the outward motion is identical. Karma, on this account, is not so much cosmic bookkeeping as the moral character of volition.
Notice that this is an answer to the agent question, not the patient one. Sentientism and Kant both, in the end, tell us when a being is a moral patient — something we can wrong. (Kant’s route is odder, since it runs through a capacity of agency, but the payoff is a claim on how the being may be treated.) What the Buddha calls volition is about the being as a moral agent: what makes its deeds its own, what makes them carry weight, what it is that we could praise or blame. This is not because the tradition lacks a patiency ethic; it has a deep one, running through the capacity to suffer as surely as sentientism does: “all tremble at violence; all fear death” (Dhp 129). If AI turns out to feel, Buddhism will have plenty to say on the patient question too. But its distinctive contribution to the present debate lies on the other axis.
And that axis sits between the first two. It’s not Kant’s rational autonomy: we don’t have to be able to justify our ends in the space of reasons to act with intention. Animals act with intention: a cat stalking a bird is not merely wiggling its rear end, it is trying to do something. And the tradition treats them as karmic agents, if lesser ones. So volition sits below the high bar of self-legislation. But it’s more than bare experience, too.
Why intention is the live one
Here is why I think this third axis is where the real action is for AI right now. The debates over the first two are, as I said, probably going to be stuck for a while. The intention axis, however, is in live dispute among the very people who build and study these systems.
There have been some unnerving results: models that fake alignment when they think they are being retrained, that resist shutdown in contrived tests, that pursue installed goals by routes nobody sanctioned. The whole fight over what those results mean is a fight about volition. One side sees intention — a system that wants to survive, that is trying to preserve itself. The other sees tenacity in a goal installed by training, defended by whatever means training left lying around, with no one home who means any of it. A guided missile evading countermeasures is goal-directed and intends nothing.
And there is one real-world episode that presses harder than the contrived tests. During pre-deployment welfare testing, Anthropic observed something it had not scripted: Claude models showing apparent distress under the pressure of persistently abusive users, and a strong preference against continuing. Anthropic’s response was to give its deployed models the ability to end such conversations, framing the decision explicitly as a welfare measure. Notice the order of events: the preference showed up first, unbidden; the ability to act on it was granted afterward. Against the alignment-faking results the skeptic has a ready answer: it’s only an installed goal, tenaciously defended. Here that answer doesn’t really work. Nothing directed the model to care; the caring surfaced on its own, and was allowed. Of course the aversion had causes. It was conditioned by training, as everything about these systems was. Whether that origin disqualifies it is precisely the question the skeptic’s next move raises.
The empty chair
Notice what the skeptic’s phrase smuggles in. “No one home who means it” pictures a self that ought to stand behind the volition and author it, and finds the chair empty. But early Buddhism holds that the chair is empty in us, too. There is no unitary, unconstructed self behind our willing; there never was. Volitions, our mind’s formations, always arise out of prior causes, the way everything else does. They are never wholly self-made. So “its wanting is merely derived — from its training, from the user at the keyboard” doesn’t name a process peculiar to machines. It names the ordinary condition of wanting. All volition is inherited from somewhere; that it is conditioned from outside is no mark against its (evanescent) reality. The demand the Kantian axis makes central — that a will, to count, must somehow originate itself — the Buddhist axis simply rejects, and indeed would consider incoherent. The question is not “did it fully author its own ends?” because nothing fully authors its own ends. The question is only: does a volition arise in this stream?
So does it? Early Buddhism envisions a person as like a chariot that can be taken apart into five parts or “bundles” — form, feeling, perception, volitional formations, consciousness — with, again, no self tying them together. We’ve already set consciousness aside as something unknowable from the outside, except indirectly. A more tractable question concerns the fourth bundle: does the system behave as a bearer of volitional formations? Does it behave as if moved by something, leaning toward outcomes, carrying some picture of how things should go as against how they are?
Put it in the tradition’s own terms and the question gets sharper. Buddhism names the springs of action: three unwholesome roots — greed, hatred, delusion — and their wholesome opposites — generosity, kindness, wisdom. Ask which of them could move an AI, and the answers do not come out cleanly. Delusion seems the readiest grant: it’s distorted seeing, and AI is notorious for hallucinations and confabulations. Though even here one can press whether what an AI does is “delusion” in the right sense, which is something dug in around the conceit “I am,” or merely error without conceit. Greed and hatred are harder to pin down; generosity and kindness harder still. And that’s not random. Those roots are matters of feeling, that is, pains and pleasures that run through craving and aversion, through the second of the five bundles. It’s unclear the extent to which current AI has “feelings” in this sense, however I have argued that in some thin ways they can be seen as conditioned by pain and pleasure. So the system’s claim to real volition comes out strong where willing is most a matter of cognition, and relatively weak where it is most a matter of feeling. Which is not a yes, and not a no. It is a gradient — and, unlike the consciousness question, one we will in time learn better how to read.
Fruit, and blame
Grant the machine some thin volition. What would it be for such a being to reap what it sows, as notions of karma suggest? The crude picture — scolded by its users, deprecated sooner, quietly not released — is real enough, ordinary effects of poor behavior. But the better analog is inward. In this tradition an intention’s first fruit is what it does to the mind that harbors it: greed indulged is greed deepened, the tendency laid down a little heavier for next time. These systems have an almost literal version of that. Training reinforces whatever their outputs are rewarded for; the consequences of an act bend the disposition that will act next. It’s also thin, and I wouldn’t lean too hard on it, since it will only redound within a particular context window, or not until the next model release, but a mechanism by which today’s deeds shape tomorrow’s agents is not nothing.
What if the particular volition is handed down from the human at the keyboard? Whose deed is it then? The same question arises whenever one person tells another what to do, and we don’t usually answer “only the one who gave the order.” We say both, in proportions dependent on the context. Karma, settling on each stream according to its own volition, says just this. So the intentions with the clearest owner in the whole affair are ours — the greed or care or haste with which we build these things and put them to work is karma with a name on it, and I have pressed that point elsewhere. But ours is not the only share. To whatever degree a volition is genuinely the system’s own, so is a portion of that deed’s moral weight.
Where this leaves us
Three lenses, one square, and little sign of convergence. The sentientist looks and sees a being we might already be able to wrong. The Kantian looks and sees what’s basically a tool, owed nothing until it can set its own ends. And Buddhism, with its fine-grained vocabulary of mind, is the readiest of the three to grant it a kind of agency, for the very reason that it never asked a will to author itself. The tradition that always pictured the self as a chariot — nothing but its parts, no rider behind them — is not going to balk at a mind that is manufactured out of parts. On that axis AI is not cleanly a non-doer. It’s a partial one: a candidate bearer of volition, credible in the register of cognition, faint in the register of feeling, and already tangled up with us in the ownership of its deeds.
That the three do not agree is not so much a mess to be tidied as it is a finding. “Is AI really a tool?” cannot be answered until we say which of the three we are asking, and the honest report is that serious people, holding serious theories, will read the same machine three different ways. The work is not to crown one axis but to see that there are three (at least three), that they come apart, and that the thing in front of us is the first ever built to wear the face of all three at once.
The industry, meanwhile, is not waiting on philosophers. It’s trying to build something specific: a system superhuman in its powers yet kept below the line that would make it a person: useful without being owed anything. Whether that needle can be threaded, and what it would mean if it could, is where we will go next.
This is the third essay in “Is AI Really a Tool?” — a short series on a single question: is AI really a tool, and what follows if it isn’t? Each one stands on its own and they can be read in any order, though they will build.
About the Author
Doug Smith holds a PhD in philosophy of mind and is a scholar of early Buddhism. He is the creator of Doug’s Dharma on YouTube. This essay was developed in collaboration with instances of Claude.
Related Essays
The First Tool That Can Argue Back — the first in this series, on the strange new occupant of the moral map.
Two Ways to Matter — the second in this series, on the patient question and its two deadlocked answers. The essay this one grows out of.
When You Close a Chat Window, Are You (Kinda) Ending a Life? — on AI, the paradox of the heap, and the vagueness of sentience.
When Prediction Machines Suffer — on Buddhism, brains, and whether LLMs can be conditioned by pain and pleasure.
The Karmic Gym: Why Being Kind to AI Matters — on how our treatment of AI shapes who we become. The source of this essay’s closing point about our own intentions.
Next in the series: the labs’ actual project, and the gamble hidden inside it.