Shelly Kagan suggests a deontological view like this in his book "How to Count Animals". Though Kagan is not himself a deontologist, he argues that the most plausible form of deontology assigns deontological status to beings according to their degree of autonomy. This results in a hierarchical view where animals and people have varying deontological statuses. The natural objection to this view is that it implies that some people have stronger rights than others. Kagan's solution is "practical realism": in practice, we should not treat status at such a fine-grained level. That would be practically infeasible and not particularly desirable. For practical purposes, it is better to have a more coarse-grained assignment of statuses, and to be cautious with regards to how we place people and animals in these varying status buckets. Thus we should treat most people as having the same status in practice. This still leaves some difficult cases, such as how to treat the severely cognitively disabled. Kagan has more to say about those difficult cases, but it goes beyond his practical realism (e.g., he thinks mere potentiality is morally relevant).
Shelly Kagan suggests a deontological view like this in his book "How to Count Animals". Though Kagan is not himself a deontologist, he argues that the most plausible form of deontology assigns deontological status to beings according to their degree of autonomy. This results in a hierarchical view where animals and people have varying deontological statuses. The natural objection to this view is that it implies that some people have stronger rights than others. Kagan's solution is "practical realism": in practice, we should not treat status at such a fine-grained level. That would be practically infeasible and not particularly desirable. For practical purposes, it is better to have a more coarse-grained assignment of statuses, and to be cautious with regards to how we place people and animals in these varying status buckets. Thus we should treat most people as having the same status in practice. This still leaves some difficult cases, such as how to treat the severely cognitively disabled. Kagan has more to say about those difficult cases, but it goes beyond his practical realism (e.g., he thinks mere potentiality is morally relevant).
My favorite deontological piece drawing this distinction is Mark Timmons on moral criteria and decision procedures in Kantian ethics. https://academic.oup.com/book/41727/chapter-abstract/354099448?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false
Great, thanks for the reference!