On the Moral Status of Infants and the Cognitively Disabled: A Reply to Jaworska and Tannenbaum

Abstract

Agnieszka Jaworska and Julie Tannenbaum address a central problem confronting efforts to understand moral status: the Problem of Nonparadigm Humans. The authors contend that human infants and cognitively disabled human beings whose capacities are comparable to those of dogs nevertheless have higher moral status. In this discussion, I will first reconstruct the authors’ assumptions and argumentative goals. In the article’s two major sections, I will examine the authors’ reasoning in pursuit of those goals and contend that the chain of argumentation contains several weak links. The discussion will close with brief reflections on how the problem might be addressed.