Abstract

To a lay audience, it might seem surprising that it has to be shown that children are rightholders, since, for instance, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights explicitly states that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” which would seem to include children as rightholders. However, the claim that all human beings are rightholders is in fact surprisingly difficult to defend. When philosophers try to explain how all human beings are rightholders, they end up adopting what Peter Singer calls a “speciesist” position, where speciesism is defined as morally favoring a particular species—in this case, human beings—over others without sufficient justification. This chapter develops the “genetic basis for moral agency” account of rightholding and explains how this account can allow all human beings, including very young children, to be rightholders without being speciesist.