ABSTRACT
Parental rights are commonly regarded as constituting a central moral dimension of the parent/child relationship. This chapter offers reasons for denying that biological parents have even presumptive or qualified moral rights to affect the courses of their children's lives in significant respects. It describes certain actual cases that highlight the practical importance of addressing and answering questions about the existence of parental rights. Parental obligations are obligations that are rooted in the parent/child relationship–obligations that people have in virtue of being parents. The chapter discusses in virtue of two features necessarily possessed by moral rights, the idea of a parental moral rights would have unacceptable implications for the parent/child relationship; hence there are good reasons for denying the existence of parental moral rights. The potential difficulty associated with the rejection of parental rights concerns the apparently clear presumption in favor of allowing biological parents to rear the children they beget or bear.
