Many people have the intuition that human babies have the same moral status as human adults despite the fact that adults are much more cognitively and emotionally sophisticated than babies.[61] Many people also have the intuition that severely cognitively-impaired humans, whose intellectual potential has been permanently curtailed, have the same moral status as species-typical humans.[62] And many people have the intuition that normal variation in human intellectual capacities makes no difference to moral status, such that astrophysicists don’t have a higher moral status than social media influencers.[63] These intuitions are easier to accommodate if moral status is discrete.[64]
I don’t think we can accommodate “Many people also have the intuition that severely cognitively-impaired humans, whose intellectual potential has been permanently curtailed, have the same moral status as species-typical humans.[62]” no matter the theoretically possible extent of impairment (as long as the individual remains sentient, say) without abandoning degrees of moral status completely. Maybe actual sentient humans have never been sufficiently impaired for this, and that’s what their intuitions refer to?
Also, if moral status is discrete but can differ between two individuals because of features that are present in both based on the degrees of expression, then the cutoff is going to be arbitrary, and that seems like a good argument against discrete statuses. So, it seems that different discrete moral statuses could only be justified by presence or complete absence of features. But then we get into weird (but perhaps not implausible) discontinuities, where an individual A could have an extra feature to a vanishing degree, but be a full finite degree of moral status above another individual, B, who is identical except for that feature, and have as much as status an individual, C, who has that feature to a very high degree, but is otherwise identical to both. We can make the degree that the feature is present arbitrarily small in A, and this would still hold.
I don’t think we can accommodate “Many people also have the intuition that severely cognitively-impaired humans, whose intellectual potential has been permanently curtailed, have the same moral status as species-typical humans.[62]” no matter the theoretically possible extent of impairment (as long as the individual remains sentient, say) without abandoning degrees of moral status completely. Maybe actual sentient humans have never been sufficiently impaired for this, and that’s what their intuitions refer to?
Also, if moral status is discrete but can differ between two individuals because of features that are present in both based on the degrees of expression, then the cutoff is going to be arbitrary, and that seems like a good argument against discrete statuses. So, it seems that different discrete moral statuses could only be justified by presence or complete absence of features. But then we get into weird (but perhaps not implausible) discontinuities, where an individual A could have an extra feature to a vanishing degree, but be a full finite degree of moral status above another individual, B, who is identical except for that feature, and have as much as status an individual, C, who has that feature to a very high degree, but is otherwise identical to both. We can make the degree that the feature is present arbitrarily small in A, and this would still hold.