 Finally, in addressing the moral status of cognitively disabled humans in a separate entry, rather than in a general entry on disability, we are not endorsing a controversial “exceptionalism” about cognitive disabilities—a view that regards them as fundamentally different from other kinds of impairment (see  Related Entries below).  Our reason for limiting ourselves to cognitive impairment is dialectical: there is currently no debate about the moral status of individuals with non-cognitive disabilities. We know of no serious philosopher who argues that people who cannot see, hear, or use their legs, or who experience frequent depression or hallucinations, have lower moral status than people without such disabilities. Admittedly, some philosophers claiming to regard humans with physical or psychiatric disabilities as having the same moral status as nondisabled humans also take positions that other philosophers see as inconsistent with a commitment to equal moral status. One notable example is Rawls’ (1971) exclusion of people with physical disabilities from the Original Position on the assumption that they are not fully cooperating members of society. Another example is the defense of “quality adjustment” in allocating scarce healthcare resources, which discounts the life-years of people with disabilities to reflect their supposedly lower quality of life (Williams 1987). But whether or not these positions are consistent with the recognition of full moral status, their proponents insist that they are; they do not attempt to argue against the equal moral status of people with physical or (most) psychiatric disabilities. By contrast, the moral status of human beings with cognitive disabilities has become a subject of intense debate among philosophers, applied ethicists, and disability scholars (for a recent discussion, see Carlson and Kittay 2009).