Peter Singer: Now, let's look at some human beings 
with cognitive disabilities. Dr. 
Harris just gave you before a breakdown 
of the percentages of people with
 cognitive disabilities that fall into 
the various ranges, and I'm focusing 
here on the very bottom of the range-
those with profound mental 
retardation-and I acknowledge that 
this is a very small percentage. In 
fact, the American Association for 
Intellectual and Developmental 
Disabilities says it's 1%, I think 
Dr. Harris said 1.5% percent. It doesn't 
matter very much. The point is that 
there are human beings with these 
capacities and I'm going to go on 
to raise arguments about claims of a 
certain kind of moral status for all 
human beings. So, from the point of
 view of making a philosophical argument, 
it's not very important whether 
it's 1% or 1.5% or 5 or 10% that we're
 talking about. What is important is
 that there are some if were addressing 
universal claims. I recognize that
 for some of you in the audience here,
 this may make what I'm saying less 
interesting, because the majority of
 you are here because the majority of 
you are here because you have a 
concern with people with cognitive 
disabilities, those who are working 
with people with cognitive 
disabilities, or those who are the 
care or the relatives of people with 
cognitive disabilities will say, 
"well, that's not like the people I work 
with or care for". That's true. 
And obviously the questions get more 
complicated once we move to issues 
about mild disability and so on. But, 
let me say, these are the people 
that I'm focusing on when I'm talking 
about those with cognitive disabilities.
 For the moment, I have in mind 
those with profound mental retardation 
as defined here and later we will 
have time for discussion. I do want 
to leave plenty of time for discussion.
 I thought it was a pity that in 
previous sessions that didn't exist and 
I'm sure that people will have questions
 and will want to challenge me. So 
we can move, if you like, to the more 
nuanced questions about people not 
in this category in question time.
So, people with profound mental 
retardation have, as Dr. Harris said, IQs 
in the range below 25. Below 25 will
 always require much supervision, 
ability to understand exceeds ability
 to speak, may have little or no 
speech, may be capable of following 
simple directions, no academic skills, 
may be unable to perform any useful work, 
may appear socially isolated and pay 
little attention to others.
