Arbitrariness and the threshold for moral status

It is widely held that entities have moral status if they possess a status-conferring property to a sufficient degree. However, this means that for at least one degree to which an entity can possess the status-conferring property and that grounds moral status, there is some incrementally lower degree of possessing the property that does not ground moral status. Critics maintain that this renders any threshold for moral status arbitrary. In this paper, we reject common responses to this arbitrariness objection, such as that moral status thresholds are not arbitrary but merely vague. Instead, we defend the moderate discontinuity view. This view holds that thresholds denote moderate rather than radical shifts in moral status and that significant shifts in the moral status of entities on opposite sides of the threshold are a function of their distance from the threshold rather than of the threshold itself. Crucially, it follows from this that there is no principled way to reconcile the commitment to the moral equality of persons with the commitment to the moral superiority of persons over nonhuman animals.