Abstract
The debate on the question of the moral status of human beings and the boundaries
of the moral community has long been dominated by the antagonism between
personism and speciesism: either certain mental properties or membership of the
human species is considered morally crucial. In this article, I argue that both schools
of thought are equally implausible in major respects, and that these shortcomings
arise from the same reason in both cases: a biological notion of being human. By contrast,
I show to what extent being human is morally relevant in a non‐biological sense.
I establish the living human form as the essential criterion for belonging to the moral
community, and defend it against a number of possible objections. This new morphological
approach is capable of capturing essential elements of personism and speciesism
without sharing their faults, and of reconstructing widespread moral intuitions.