• ethics
• dementia

I thank the commentators for engaging with my work and for their thoughtful and constructive contributions. I also extend my gratitude to the editors of the Journal of Medical Ethics for facilitating such a lively scholarly dialogue on the topic.

In this response paper, I will briefly address some of the key issues raised by the commentators and attempt to bring into conversation different viewpoints put forward by the commentators.

Questioning whether my proposed account evades the objection of redundancy of the dignity talk, Barclay1 invites me to clarify why my position cannot be framed as:

because of their inherent, basic, capabilities all human beings have moral worth, which grounds obligations on others to ensure they live a flourishing life [Barclay, XX].1

In response, I raise two points.

First, the above formulation would be under-specified about both the forms of capabilities and moral worth at stake. Following Nussbaum, my focus in the paper was on ‘a certain set of normatively chosen capabilities’.2 Dignity is a (or the name for a) particular kind of moral worth (or relational moral status) that human beings have by virtue of having (and exercising) certain capabilities. The normative criteria used to pick out certain capabilities as those relevant to …