 The central question in the debate over the full moral status of human beings with radical cognitive disabilities concerns the type of attributes on which moral status is based. Most of those who deny or question the full moral status of all human beings insist that moral status must be based exclusively on attributes or properties of the individual; those attributes must be identifiable by a biological or psychological inventory of that individual, with no reference to the biological or social environment it inhabits. For example, it would be possible to assess an individual’s self-consciousness or practical rationality knowing nothing about its fellow creatures (although the assessment itself might have to be done by self-conscious and practically rational creatures). In contrast, we could not ascertain an individual’s species membership or social relationships without knowing a great deal about the world it inhabited. We will call accounts based solely on individual attributes “individually-based”; we will label “group-based” those accounts based on facts about the individual’s membership in a biological or social group, or her relationship with other members of that group. Those facts may concern the individual’s biological origins, the typical or average characteristics of a biological or social group to which she belongs, or her actual relationships with other individuals. Although some individually-based accounts concern an individual’s capacity or potential to form relationships of certain kinds with other individuals, it is that capacity or potential which confers moral status, not the existence of such relationships.