Brown's son, Walker, was born with a genetic mutation that has deprived him of even the most rudimentary capacities.
A feature writer at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, Brown combines a reporter's curiosity with a novelist's instinctive feel for the unknowable in this exquisite book, an account — at once tender, pained and unexpectedly funny — of his son, Walker, who was born with a rare genetic mutation that has deprived him of even the most rudimentary capacities.
Thus, while one may grant that rudimentary capacities ground some moral status, one must look beyond such capacities to explain the difference in moral status between humans and most animals.
Most (but not all) animals meet these lowered standards for FMS – they have the capacity for pleasure, pain, interests, and consciousness – and so their moral status would be on a par with most human beings (namely all those who possess these rudimentary capacities).
Nevertheless, that such a volatile, bellicose and unstable regime should possess even a rudimentary nuclear capacity is enough of a security threat.
While some officials privately acknowledged that they would still like to roll back what one called North Korea's "rudimentary" nuclear capacity, a more realistic goal is to stop the country from devising a small weapon deliverable on a short-, medium- or long-range missile.
For some, the fact that she could combine symbols to form new words such as "water bird" when shown a swan for the first time was evidence of at least rudimentary language capacity.
Some philosophers eschew the language of moral status and, in any case, would not allow that it comes in degrees; they claim that all beings who have the relevant rudimentary cognitive capacities deserve "equal moral consideration".
Our present knowledge of the transcriptional machinery and its regulatory capacity is rudimentary.
To extend the pathways of ammonia recirculation into a rudimentary C4 cycle, a capacity to regenerate malate from pyruvate in the mesophyll is required.
