Critiques of “Moral Status”: The Case of People With Disability

This article provides a justification for whether a human being with a disability should be viewed as a person. Within the discourse of moral and political philosophy, personhood is a serious consideration to determine a person’s moral status. This article considers some philosophical debates regarding the moral status of people with disabilities. It investigates the question: Why shouldn’t people living with disabilities be treated as normal people? The answer to this question raises another one: Are capacity and personhood the only conditions to have moral status? If so, how should a person with a disability be defined? After searching for the answers to these questions, the article came to the conclusion that only moral status is not a result of having the capacity of moral agency but that it is based more on other things. Finally, I conclude that the capacity of acting virtuously or consciously or sentience is not on its own a sufficient condition to grant moral agency to an entity. There are many other conditions to consider the moral status of People with Disabilities.