For some philosophers in this first group, all homo sapiens belong to a kind whose nature or norm it is to possess rationality or similar attributes.
Human beings might be animals, but only they possess rationality, language, consciousness, or emotions, which justified and also explained in terms of evolution their perceptions of inferiority and superiority (Mullin 1999; O'Rourke 2000).
With respect to the status of infants and those suffering from dementia, the critic might bite the bullet and just accept the fact that human dignity does not extend to them, or else argue that the fact that infants and those suffering mental breakdown are part of a species whose members typically possess rationality merits them a special respect, even if they lack this quality as individuals.
Kant also believed that, because animals do not possess rationality, we cannot have duties to them except indirect duties not to develop immoral dispositions through cruelty towards them.
Calvinists have rationality".
It becomes its own rationality".
Rationality involves possessing the ability to recognize the force of reasons.
Rawls' theory of justice rests on the belief that individuals are free, equal, and moral; he regarded all human beings as possessing some degree of reasonableness and rationality, which he saw as the constituents of morality and entitling their possessors to equal justice.
Though there are further technical conditions to extend the theory to infinite sets of alternatives and to capture further plausible rationality conditions concerning gambles, economists generally subscribe to a view of a rational agent as possessing complete and transitive preferences and as choosing among the feasible alternatives whatever he or she most prefers.
The reason is that individuals with cognitive disabilities have served as test cases in debates about the moral relevance of possessing such intellectual attributes as self-consciousness and practical rationality.
He claims that this conception of rationality is implied by the fact that decision theorists are able to represent the rational actions of any agent possessing a well-behaved preference ordering as the maximization of a utility function.
