about deserving moral consideration? or about being a "person" or not? about "moral consideration", trees deserve "moral consideration". the only question is how much....as for the rest of it, and i'm just going by the paraphrase above, the question over what's a person is fairly irrelevant if i'm not mistaken chimps are "self aware" aren't they? the only mental difference is the capacity for language right? i don't really see any distinct seperation for persons other than like specie criteria or whatever. one can't go around making language evaluations because one can be sentient and be deficient with language...because there's a certain window (i think it's like 3 to 7 years old) where if humans aren't introduced to language, mostly happening with isolated deaf people, that capacity becomes very limited.
~M.E.