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You can, but you will have some slight consistency issues (as well as taste issues, since low fat PB is kinda awful).
They may be drier than regular PB cookies, or have a more chemical taste or be a bit oily.
There will be more issues if you are trying to make the cookies lowfat overall (like using a fake butter, fake sugar etc.) but with JUST low fat PB but still real butter, sugar, vanilla etc. they won't be too bad.

I think low-fat PB is made with soy - not sure how that would change the consistency/taste, but if it's a matter of preference over availability, I'd stick with regular PB for baking.

I think it depends on the PB in question. Kraft light peanut butter which has 25% less fat but no added ingredients would work fine. Personally, I think it's as good as the regular stuff. Low fat PB which has added sugar and texturing agents might not give very good results in baking. I suggest using the just peanuts type of PB and adjusting sugar and fat content to your personal taste.

The problem with low-fat peanut butter is a lot of them have added sugars. They end up with the same calorie count as full-fat peanut butter...just without the good, heart-healthy fats. However, that does nothing to answer your question, so this probably isn't a very useful post. Sorry about that, haha.

That low-fat stuff is not just loaded with sugars, but it's also full of chemical additives that our bodies really can't handle. Go for the natural, full fat stuff-it's GOOD for you and your body can recognize and digest the fat. In my opinion, eating good fats will only better your health, whereas consuming all those added sugars (from the reduced-fat PB and elsewhere) is the main dietary culprit.

if you;ve got a food processor, make your own nut butters, very easy very simple and the cookies it makes are the best ever! I use a little peanut oil, or walnut oil depending on the nut i'm grinding, I also dont use sugar at all but a tiny bit of honey, and doing it myself lets me add sea salt rather than iodized and alot less than they would use in a jar. In other words, if you do it yourself you have better control of the fat content and you get a MUCH BETTER cookie! SO loves my cashew butter cookies.

There are two peanut butters out there, Naturally More and Power Butter, that are a little lower in fat and higher in protein due to the addition of egg whites. Calories are the almost same though. The ingredient lists look pretty non-sketchy...peanuts, egg whites, flaxseed, and other not horribly processed-sounding ingredients, though neither are just peanuts like the real natural stuff and the texture is a little different, so I'm not sure how they'd work in recipes. They're pretty tasty though...NM is my preferred PB&J peanut butter. If I were you, I'd go for either one of these or another natural PB (my other standbys for when I can't find NM or Power Butter are Justin's Nut Butter, Crazy Richard's, and Smucker's Natural).

@huneybumper--homemade nut butters are the BEST! My family used to get big containers of cashews and almonds from Costco and make nut butter using the Champion juicer--usually a combination of cashew and something else. The cashews are so oily no other oil was necessary. Cashew + almond was a really delicious combination. I could get down with a cookie made from that instead of peanut butter!

I was going to suggest Naturally More peanut butter too, but cycorider beat me to it. I ate low-fat pb for years until natural peanut butter became the craze, and I realized how much junk was in the processed stuff. Still, that put me right back up at regular fat & calorie amounts, and that wasn't cool either. I tried soy butters, and found I didn't like the taste of them at all. But I tried Naturally More a couple years ago, and have been addicted ever since. It is an all-natural peanut butter with short ingredient list of real ingredients, and is substantially lower in fat (although not in calories, and I don't know about sugar or sodium). It works really well in baking, and in my opinion, it keeps your baked good really moist since it's more loose than a processed pb. My other favorite is Smucker's Natural (with honey), but that isn't lower fat.

Oh, one more thing. STAY AWAY FROM BETTER THAN PEANUT BUTTER. I love PB and have been known to eat a jar in one sitting, paired only with a spoon, and once decided to try Better than Peanut Butter because it's nutritionals sounded like they'd do less damage to me than the fat and calorie bomb of a jar of normal peanut butter. Blaaarrghh...it's sweet and tastes like a fluffernutter, has a texture that looks way too much like baby crap, is an insult to all things peanut-buttery, and I think I'd rather eat roadkill.

@pooch - darn straights.

screw the low-fat PB--it's probably got some unknown filler in it or something.

Er, "many" should be "maybe." Damn you, day job, getting in the way of my SE...

@huneybumper--I never use in-store nut-grinders for the same reasons! Ewwww... Plus, Consumer Reports reported the varieties of peanut butter who used the best and worst quality peanuts. Skippy won for best quality, and in-store nut-grinders won the prize for worst (and in fact some contained hazardous molds and the like).