ABSTRACT
The notion of moral status has come to occupy a central role in the practical ethics literature. To have moral status is to be morally considerable, or to have moral standing. It is to be an entity toward which moral agents have, or can have, moral obligations. Moral status is not an independent factor that secures monolithic treatment for all who have it. It is a kind of placeholder for attribution of reasons to regard and treat an entity in certain ways. The assumption is that adult human beings are the paradigm case of an entity with moral status. Sometimes this assumption is fleshed out further by the claim that adult human beings have full moral status – a term that at least implies that moral status is what some call a threshold concept. That is, although moral status comes in amounts, there is a place beyond which moral status ceases to increase.
