  On anthropocentric views of moral status, normal human adults have the moral status they do simply because they are human beings, that is, because they are members of the species Homo sapiens (Noonan 1970; Devine 1978; Schwarz 1990). As has often been noted, anthropocentric views seem to suffer from an explanatory gap: it is hard to see how being a member of a certain species could give an individual its moral status (Regan 1978; Feinberg 1980; DeGrazia 1996, 56–61). Nonetheless proponents of these views argue that they provide the only way to adequately explain the equal moral status of all human beings, even human beings who lack high-level cognitive capacities, and thereby to avoid the so-called “marginal cases” that afflict cognitive capacity views.