 Now consider capacities, since they, and not activities, ground moral status. Unimpaired babies’ activities with their caretakers can straightforwardly fit the above template, so babies have the capacity to incompletely realize cognitively sophisticated activities, and thus have the corresponding elevated moral status. Perhaps more surprisingly, even many human beings incapable of achieving cognitive sophistication can fit the above template. A caretaker of such impaired humans is required, in virtue of that role, to have that human’s flourishing as an end, and the flourishing of a human being encompasses developing sophisticated cognitive capacities. When circumstances are unfavorable and the caretaker cannot reasonably hold the latter, subsidiary end as an aim to be realized, the caretaker can still reasonably hold this end as a standard (meeting condition 1), i.e. as a guide as to what next best aim to adopt. The activities of many cognitively impaired human beings can be feasible means to the caretaker’s next best aim guided by this standard (meeting condition 2). In this way, these beings have the capacity to incompletely realize cognitively sophisticated activities and so also have the corresponding elevated moral status. By contrast, it would never be reasonable for a dog’s caretaker to hold the standard of developing the dog’s cognitive sophistication, since the dog can fully flourish without such sophistication. Moreover, typically it is also unreasonable to hold the end of making the dog cognitively sophisticated as an aim (not merely as a standard). But even in some odd circumstances a caretaker could reasonably adopt this aim, the activities of the dog would fail the feasibility condition (2). So, either way, dogs lack incompletely realized cognitively sophisticated capacities.