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Argument from marginal cases
The argument from marginal cases (also known as the argument from species overlap〔(【引用サイトリンク】 website=Animal Ethics )〕) is a philosophical argument within animal rights theory regarding the moral status of non-human animals. Its proponents hold that if human infants, the senile, the comatose, and the cognitively disabled have direct moral status, animals must have a similar status, since there is no known morally relevant ability that those marginal-case humans have that animals lack. "Moral status" may refer to a right not to be killed or made to suffer, or to a general moral requirement to be treated in a certain way.〔Dombrowski, Daniel (1997). ''Babies and Beasts: The Argument from Marginal Cases''. University of Illinois Press.〕
==Overview of the argument==
The argument from marginal cases takes the form of a proof by contradiction. It attempts to show that you cannot coherently believe both that all humans have moral status, ''and'' that all non-humans lack moral status.
Consider a cow. We ask why it is acceptable to kill this cow for food – we might claim, for example, that the cow has no concept of self and therefore it cannot be wrong to kill it. However, many young children may also lack this same concept of "self".〔Harter, S. (1983). Developmental perspectives on the self-system. In P. H. Mussen (Ed.), Handbook of child psychology, (4th ed., Vol. 4, (pp. 275–385). New York: Wiley.〕 So if we accept the self-concept criterion, then we must also accept that killing children is acceptable in addition to killing cows, which is considered a ''reductio ad absurdum''. So the concept of self cannot be our criterion.
The proponent will usually continue by saying that for any criterion or set of criteria (e.g. language, consciousness, ethics) there exists some "marginal" human who is mentally handicapped in some way that would also meet the criteria for having no moral status. Peter Singer phrases it this way:
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