 An account that accorded interests moral weight in proportion to their strength would not require a notion of moral status, even if beings of a particular type tended to have stronger interests. Thus, philosophers who account for our differing obligations to beings of different species in terms of their unequal interests tend to regard “moral status” as an unnecessary or inert notion (Harman, 2003, 187), or to conclude that all beings with interests (for which sentience is often thought necessary) have equal moral status (Rossi, 2010). This denial of different levels of moral status, however, licenses the unequal treatment of human beings with the most severe cognitive impairments if they are assumed to have weaker interests, especially in survival. Thus, it offers cold comfort to defenders of the moral equality of all human beings.