 At the most general level, there are two ways of understanding moral status, or what others sometimes call “moral standing” or “moral considerability.” On the utilitarian approach (see the entry on the  history of utilitarianism),  moral considerability (their preferred term) is a matter of having one’s interests (e.g., the intensity, duration, etc. of one’s pleasure or pain) factored into the calculus that determines which action brings about the greatest utility. On the non-utilitarian approach, to have moral status is for there to be reasons to act for the sake of the entity or its interest, reasons which are prior to, and may clash with, what the calculation of the overall best consequences would dictate. The non-utilitarian approach is necessarily coupled with two further ideas: acting unjustifiably against such reasons as well as failing to give these reasons their proper weight in deliberation is not only wrong but wrongs the entity and one owes it to the entity to avoid acting in this way. Note that utilitarians could incorporate these two ideas by claiming that it is owed to entities with moral status to properly incorporate their interests into the utilitarian calculus, and that one wrongs an entity when this is not done. But these two ideas are inessential to the utilitarian approach.