Feinberg, Mills, and the Child’s Right to an Open Future Mianna Lotz 1. Introduction Appeals to the notion of a child’s right to an open future––famously articu- lated by Joel Feinberg in his 1980 paper “The Child’s Right to an Open Future”–– have become commonplace in applied ethics, particularly in debates over genetic reproductive technologies. 1 Here the concern to protect that right reflects antici- pated and real increases in the extent to which the genetic characteristics of future children might be selected or manipulated. The need to protect a child’s right to an open future has been invoked to buttress opposition to cloning, genetic selection, and genetic engineering. Yet the capacity and the precise way in which such interventions might threaten the child’s right to an open future is a matter of considerable dispute. We are far from reaching a consensus as to whether a future child could be harmed or wronged––in the sense of having her autonomy threatened––by being a clone, or having been genetically selected or manipulated for possession of certain desired traits, including sex or sexual orientation. 2 In spite of its considerable interest, responding to that question is not my purpose in this paper. My starting point is the observation that there has been relatively little precise analysis of the nature of the parental duties that are to be taken as corresponding to a child’s right to an open future. 3 On the standard way of thinking about rights––namely as claim rights with correlative duties––to ask about the nature of the duties that flow from a given right is to ask about the nature of the right itself. In this paper I adopt that approach, treating the right to an open future as a claim right. I want to delineate the exact limits and scope of the duties imposed by a right to an open future, in terms more precise than Feinberg’s own. For that purpose, it will be helpful to analyze the right in terms of whether it is characterizable as a positive and/or a negative right. 4 The question I am asking is, then: What kind of a claim right is the right to an open future? Is it a negative claim right, that is, a liberty right held against others interfering in, or trespassing on, one’s life, liberty or property in some way? As I read it, the most common treatment of the right to an open future in the literature takes it to be of this negative variety. The parental duty thereby imposed is the duty––a “negative” duty––not to behave in any way that violates the child’s capacity to have an open future. However, an alternative interpretation is available, according to which the right establishes a more substantive duty on the part of parents, sometimes JOURNAL of SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 37 No. 4, Winter 2006, 537–551. © 2006 Blackwell Publishing, Inc.