The foundation of the child's right to an open future.

A cluster of difficult ethical questions concern the treatment of children. Some are about what it is permissible to do to children. For example, may parents take their child out of school at an early age so she can work in the family business, or so she is not corrupted by the modern world? May they modify their child’s genome to make her closer to their ideal? May the state require children to be vaccinated for the good of others? Other questions concern what the state and parents are obliged to do for children. For example, must children be provided with a certain level of education? Must they be provided with summer camps and music lessons? Should medical decisions be made only in their best interests? These are difficult questions, in part, because views about how children should be raised and the scope of parental authority are frequently an important constituent of people’s comprehensive doctrines.1 How someone parents and how his children turn out are likely to matter a great deal to him and his judgments about them will reflect his deeply personal views about what makes a life go well. One might expect, therefore, that disagreement about the appropriate treatment of children would be pervasive, and that resolving it would require significant work on foundational issues in moral and political philosophy. One popular way to answer these questions about the treatment of children offers the prospect of sidestepping many of these issues by citing the child’s “right to an open future.”2 Originally coined by Joel Feinberg in 1980, the right to an open future encompasses a set of moral rights children possess that are derived from the autonomy rights of adults. In brief, the right protects the child against having important life choices determined by others before she has the ability to make them for herself. The content of the right to an open future therefore includes restrictions on what parents (and others) are allowed to do to children, and, on some interpretations, tells us with what parents (and others) ought to provide children. It is now common to cite the child’s right to an open future in discussions of obligations to children. It is cited as a guiding consideration in discussions of issues as diverse as the ethics of vaccinating children against smoking, declining cochlear implants for deaf children, testing for late-onset genetic diseases, and genetic enhancement.3 In most cases, it is simply assumed that every child has a “right to an open future” and that Feinberg demonstrated its existence. Occasionally, Feinberg’s argument for the right is recapitulated.4 Thus, the child’s right to an open future has the status of a result in applied ethics. If Feinberg’s original argument were to have demonstrated the existence of a right to an open future, then it would be a very helpful result. It would be helpful because Feinberg seems to derive the right from the autonomy rights of adults and his derivation suggests that the content of the right to an open future can also be derived from the content of these autonomy rights. There is much more widespread agreement about the content of many adult autonomy rights than there is about the normative relationships between children, their parents, and the state. For example, it is generally agreed that, so long as they do not risk harm to others, competent adults ought to be permitted to practice their religion as they see fit, to move around their country, to take work, possess personal property, found a family with a consenting spouse, say what they wish to in public, associate with whomever they choose, and so forth.5 If Feinberg’s derivation worked, it would be possible to answer questions about what is owed to children by reference to these relatively uncontroversial rights. In this paper I argue that Feinberg’s account of the right to an open future cannot, in fact, help us answer these questions. If Feinberg’s paper is to provide a method with which to derive the content of the child’s right to an open future, then the right should be interpreted as a right to a maximally open future. But this strong interpretation is unjustified: the arguments that can be found in Feinberg in favor of the right are invalid, and, in any case, this interpretation of the right to an open future has implausible implications. A moderate interpretation of the right to an open future, according to which children have a right to acquire some reasonable range of skills and options, is more plausible. However, if a moderate interpretation is correct, there is not only no argument in Feinberg to support it, there is also no method for deriving the content of the right. Without such a method we have to bring in other moral considerations in order to work out the limits on parental discretion and what children are owed. The right to an open future then does no normative work.