 More categorical interest-based approaches ground moral status in the capacity to experience oneself as a temporally-extended being whose life can go better or worse (Singer 1993; Tooley 1983) or to value one’s own existence (Harris 1985; Newson 2007). Individuals having such capacities can care about and value their future lives in ways that individuals lacking those capacities cannot, giving them a qualitatively weightier interest in those lives (McMahan 2002). Whether or not such capacities can account for the threshold and range features of full moral status, their adoption as criteria appears to deny that status to human beings with the most significant cognitive impairments.