Ethical Embodiment and Moral Reasoning: A Challenge to Peter Singer Rachel Tillman November 2011 Introduction At a 2008 conference called “Cognitive Disability: Challenges to Bioethics”, <1> Peter Singer presented a paper entitled “Speciesism and Moral Status.” <2> In this paper, Singer seeks to “clarify moral status”, which means, according to him, finding a criterion by which it is possible to evaluate moral worth across species. He articulates a criterion he calls “cognitive ability,” asserting that it is possible to objectively compare species on the basis of this criterion. When he makes use of this criterion to evaluate moral worth across species, he finds that certain animals have a “higher” moral status than certain “severely cognitively disabled” humans. He then determines that we can reserve the notion of “personhood” for those beings that have enough cognitive capacity to project themselves into the future, and thus that killing certain “severely cognitively disabled” humans is a morally defensible action, because they do not suffer from such a death in the same way persons would. Like Singer’s conference respondent Eva Kittay, those who have personally known one or more human beings who are “severely cognitively disabled” are likely to find Singer’s conclusions abhorrent. Yet he continues to convince many of the validity of his arguments. Rather than argue directly against his conclusions, I want to propose that the best way to call them into question is to discredit his methods of moral reasoning. If these are problematic, his conclusions cannot hold. This paper uses feminist critiques of epistemology and moral theory to demonstrate why and to what extent Singer’s methods of moral reasoning are problematic. My principal claim is that Singer fails to adequately