I compare a 'realist' with a 'social-relational' perspective on our judgments of the moral status of machines. I argue that moral status is closely bound up with a being's ability to experience states of conscious satisfaction or suffering (CSS). The social-relational view may be right that a wide variety of social interactions between us and machines will proliferate in future generations, and that the appearance of CSS-features in such machines may make moral-role attribution socially prevalent in human-machine relations. But the social world is enabled and constrained by the physical world. Features analogous to physiological features in biological CSS are what need to be present for non-biological CSS. Working out the details of such features will be a scientific inquiry sharing the same kind of 'objectivity' as, for instance, physicists' questions about dark matter.
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