“The question is not Can they reason? Or Can they talk? But Can they suffer?” Bentham here is playing a powerful card philosophers call the “argument from marginal cases,” or AMC for short. It goes like this: There are humans—infants, the severely retarded, the demented—whose mental function does not rise to the level of a chimpanzee. Even though these people cannot reciprocate our moral attentions (obey the golden rule, etc.) we nevertheless include them in the circle of our moral consideration. So on what basis do we exclude the chimpanzee?
