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Sure. But that is not an argument about moral weight - it is not a claim that the mentally disabled deserve the joy of parenthood less than geniuses, that it is all, else being equal, less regrettable for them to be deprived of it than for a clever person to be deprived of it. That is what I find ghoulish. What you describe are arguments about whether certain mentally disabled individuals are even mentally capable of tasting that particular joy without instead expe. "Can dogs safely eat chocolate?" is an entirely different question from "Provided you had a dog that could eat chocolate with no ill effects and liked it, would it be better to give a bar of chocolate to the dog than not to?".
I think it is a moral argument, through and through.
Desert is an even more complicated area of philosophy which is kind of neither here nor there, but let's go back to what I was responding to in your earlier comment real quick:
This is sort of just not true, at least given the sort of academic work I've discussed. They do, in fact, think that there exists a person who is not able to morally consent, which, given the conceptual framework, cashes out as "they should not have sexual relations", and it would be morally wrong if they did. Do not interpret this as assigning any particular blameworthiness at this stage; blameworthiness is yet another separate consideration. That said, I think folks would be getting pretty close to assigning some level of blameworthiness to another individual who helped such a mentally disabled person (who is incapable of morally consenting) have sex, even if they wanted to. There's sort of nothing about desert in here.
I don't think this is really the case. IIRC, the academic work was perfectly happy to stipulate that the hypothetical sufficiently mentally disabled person in question was mentally capable of feeling joy from sex. It was the consent part, the morally-important part (especially to those who think that consent is the be all end all of sexual morality, in which camp this philosopher definitely resided), that was subject to consideration.
Since the academic work was confined to the question of sexual relations, specifically, I don't believe it addressed questions about 'the joy of raising a family', but I think it would be at least coherent to similarly assume that such a person may, indeed, be capable of feeling joy from having children and doing whatever it is that they can do to raise them, but I think that's also kind of neither here nor there if we're in a world where they may not be capable of consenting to sexual relations in the first place. Questions may get even harder if one pokes at the content of what it means to 'raise a family' and to what extent they are able to do that. (I am taking no position on this.)
I think this is emblematic of one of the other issues I had with the entire academic project of distilling all sexual morality down to consent. How broadly does one look for possible ill effects? There were multiple different cases (youth for sure, but some of the discussion touched on other cases) where even he couldn't stop himself from turning it into some sort of empirical test. Vaguely something like whether, say, 'allowing' youth to legally/morally consent to sexual relations generally did more harm to them or not. When one goes down this route, IMO, it's no longer an actual investigation into the philosophy and conceptual nature of consent. It's about being stuck to only having one term in your toolbox to use for all things sexual morality and simply trying to slap it on to cases that one finds objectionable for other reasons (some sense of empirical 'harm' in this case). Letting this sort of thing leak through into the conceptual nature of consent and one's ability to consent opens the door to all sorts of other thorny, even hotter-button issues, where many people (especially left-leaning ones) would vehemently object.
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