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

Slater, J. (2025. The Overgeneralization of the Future Like Ours Argument. The New Bioethics, 31 (1), 1-12. doi:10.1080/20502877.2025.2483588) argues that Don Marquis's Future-Like-Ours (FLO) account overgeneralizes by producing conclusions about cognitively enhanced animals and alien 'seeds'. This article defends FLO by showing that Slater's reductios depend on a permissive conception of present potential, according to which any externally producible valuable future confers moral status. I instead propose an intrinsic-nature account grounded in the distinction between active and passive potentiality. A being possesses potential for a valuable future only where that future would develop from its own first-order nature under supportive conditions, rather than being externally installed. This account defeats the enhanced-dog case and either resolves the alien-seed case or recasts it as an objection about positive duties. It also avoids disputed empirical claims about contraception and clarifies FLO's metaphysical commitments without abandoning its central deprivation-based account of killing.