 “Moral status” is not part of the shared vocabulary of all ethical theories. An act utilitarian, for example, has no more use for that concept than for “respect,” “rights,” or “inviolability.” For a theory that accorded weight to beings only in proportion to the utility they enjoyed or produced, the concept of moral status would be relevant only in the indirect sense that its use would affect aggregate utility in various ways. For example, the negative utility that might result from denying some human beings full moral status might support a policy of treating all human beings as if they had full moral status (see  Sec. 4).  On such a theory, the most salient moral property of an individual is her capacity to occupy states that can be characterized as “good” or “bad,” the most obvious being pleasure and pain. The possession of such a capacity gives an individual a morally considerable interest in occupying or avoiding such states. Moral considerability is: 1) continuous, in that the degree of moral considerability that a being possesses varies in proportion to the strength, character, and number of its interests; and 2) asymmetrical, in the sense that a being might have moral claims on others without others having moral claims on it.