Defending Marquis's Future-Like-Ours Argument: A Response to Slater

Area of Science:

• Bioethics
• Moral Philosophy

Background:

• Don Marquis's Future-Like-Ours (FLO) theory is a prominent account of the wrongness of killing.
• Slater (2025) critiques FLO, arguing it overgeneralizes to cases like cognitively enhanced animals and alien 'seeds'.

Purpose of the Study:

• To defend Marquis's FLO account from Slater's overgeneralization critique.
• To propose a refined intrinsic-nature account of potentiality to address specific objections.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of Slater's reductio arguments against FLO.
• Distinction between active and passive potentiality to define intrinsic future potential.
• Re-evaluation of the enhanced-dog and alien-seed thought experiments.

Main Results:

• Slater's critique relies on a permissive view of present potential, which is rejected.
• An intrinsic-nature account, distinguishing active and passive potentiality, successfully addresses the enhanced-dog case.
• The alien-seed case is resolved or reframed as an issue of positive duties.

Conclusions:

• The refined FLO account, based on intrinsic potentiality, remains a robust ethical framework.
• The revised approach avoids disputed empirical claims and clarifies FLO's metaphysical underpinnings.
• The core deprivation-based account of killing is preserved.