  To see the first problem, notice that despite the terminology of human dignity, whether some non-human animals have the capacities that ground human dignity and whether some humans lack the capacities that ground human dignity are empirical questions. As to the former, Karpowicz et al. maintain that “[t]he family of capacities associated with human dignity seem to belong uniquely to human beings” (ibid., 122); as to the latter, they maintain that “those who are human and yet display a limited subset of these capacities, say, the newborn infant or the person with severe disabilities, still have human dignity” (ibid., 121). These answers are inconsistent.  If the dignity-grounding capacities of a human infant are sufficient to give it human dignity, then the many non-human animals with the same or greater degree of dignity-grounding capacities have human dignity as well. Alternatively, if a chimpanzee’s lack of dignity-grounding capacities is sufficient to imply that it does not have human dignity, then the even more meager dignity-grounding capacities of a human infant are also sufficient to imply that it does not have human dignity.