 For the most part, the philosophers who have considered these claims were not primarily concerned with the treatment or moral status of cognitively disabled human beings—they sought to challenge existing practices toward fetuses or animals, or the rationales for such practices. But those claims have significant practical implications for cognitively disabled human beings. If the justification for treating living beings in certain ways does rest to some extent on their possession or lack of intellectual attributes, then it may be acceptable to treat cognitively disabled human beings in ways that it would be unacceptable to treat cognitively nondisabled humans. This implication, a kind of philosophical blowback from the debates on animal rights and abortion, has become the subject of sustained controversy in applied ethics.