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3 - Severe Cognitive Disability and the Relationship between Moral and Social Equality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 December 2025

Matilda Carter
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
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Summary

To use Ronald Dworkin’s well-known phrase, moral equality is usually taken to be the ‘egalitarian plateau’ on which theories of social justice (including theories of social equality) are built. If this is right, then people living with dementia must be our moral equals, in the sense of possessing the same basic moral standing, if we are to have duties of social justice towards them. Yet there are a number of influential moral philosophers who hold that severe cognitive disability, including advanced dementia, can strip a person of this status. This chapter defends the moral equality of people living with dementia, at all stages of progression, and thereby also defends the weight of their claims to social justice.

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