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The Best Available Parent

Ethics 131 (3):431-459 (2021)

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  1. Feeding Infants: Choice-Specific Considerations, Parental Obligation, and Pragmatic Satisficing.Clare Marie Moriarty & Ben Davies - 2024 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 27 (2):167-183.
    Health institutions recommend that young infants be exclusively breastfed on demand, and it is widely held that parents who can breastfeed have an obligation to do so. This has been challenged in recent philosophical work, especially by Fiona Woollard. Woollard’s work critically engages with two distinct views of parental obligation that might ground such an obligation—based on maximal benefit and avoidance of significant harm—to reject an obligation to breastfeed. While agreeing with Woollard’s substantive conclusion, this paper (drawing on philosophical discussion (...)
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  • A Project View of the Right to Parent.Benjamin Lange - 2023 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 1:1-23.
    The institution of the family and its importance have recently received considerable attention from political theorists. Leading views maintain that the institution’s justification is grounded, at least in part, in the non-instrumental value of the parent-child relationship itself. Such views face the challenge of identifying a specific good in the parent-child relationship that can account for how adults acquire parental rights over a particular child—as opposed to general parental rights, which need not warrant a claim to parent one’s biological progeny. (...)
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  • Why Parents’ Interests Matter.Scott Altman - 2022 - Ethics 133 (2):271-285.
    This discussion responds to two recent articles defending a child-centered view of parenting. Anca Gheaus and James Dwyer argue that children should be reared by the best available parent, who, in turn, should make choices based only on children’s welfare. They claim that love and respect require this fiduciary stance. However, love and respect do not justify child-centered norms. If children were competent, they would embrace norms that accommodate parental interests because they benefit from nonfiduciary rules, are grateful to their (...)
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  • Against private surrogacy: a child-centred view.Anca Gheaus - forthcoming - Oxford University Press.
    Surrogacy involves a private agreement whereby a woman who gestates a child attempts to surrender her (putative) moral right to become the parent of that child such that another person (or persons), of the woman’s choice, can acquire it. Since people lack the normative power to privately transfer custody, attempts to do so are illegitimate, and the law should reflect this fact.
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  • The Problem of Authority and Divorce.Danielle Levitan - 2021 - Keele Law Review 2:63-91.
    In this paper, I argue against any state intrusion and interference that amounts to scrutiny of parents based on their decision to separate. The state, to my mind, ought not to be involved in childrearing decisions in cases of divorce unless there is a sufficient reason, and, as I will argue, divorce per se does not present a level of risk to children that justifies state intervention. The claims I am about to make apply not only to parental capability tests (...)
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  • The normative importance of pregnancy challenges surrogacy contracts.Anca Gheaus - 2016 - Analize. Journal of Gender and Feminist Studies 6 (20):20-31.
    Birth mothers usually have a moral right to parent their newborns in virtue of a mutual attachment formed, during gestation, between the gestational mother and the fetus. The attachment is formed, in part, thanks to the burdens of pregnancy, and it serves the interest of the newborn; the gestational mother, too, has a powerful interest in the protection of this attachment. Given its justification, the right to parent one's gestated baby cannot be transferred at will to other people who would (...)
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  • Moral Parenthood: Not Gestational.Benjamin Lange - forthcoming - Journal of Medical Ethics.
    Parenting our biological children is a centrally important matter, but how, if it all, can it be justified? According to a contemporary influential line of thinking, the acquisition by parents of a moral right to parent their biological children should be grounded by appeal to the value of the intimate emotional relationship that gestation facilitates between a newborn and a gestational procreator. I evaluate two arguments in defence of this proposal and argue that both are unconvincing.
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  • Divine Authority as Divine Parenthood.Nick Hadsell - forthcoming - Religious Studies.
    In this article, I argue that God is authoritative over us because he is our divine, causal parent. As our causal parent, God has duties to relate to us, but he can only fulfill those duties if he has the practical authority to give us commands aimed at our sanctification. From ought-implies-can reasoning, I conclude that God has that authority. After I make this argument, I show how the view has significant advantages over extant arguments for divine authority and can (...)
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  • A cosmopolitan instrumentalist theory of secession.Daniel Weltman - 2023 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 61 (3):527-551.
    I defend the cosmopolitan instrumentalist theory of secession, according to which a group has a right to secede only if this would promote cosmopolitan justice. I argue that the theory is preferable to other theories of secession because it is an entailment of cosmopolitanism, which is independently attractive, and because, unlike other theories of secession, it allows us to give the answers we want to give in cases like secession of the rich or secession that would make things worse for (...)
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  • The Best Available Parent and Duties of Justice.Jordan Walters - 2022 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 23 (2):304-311.
    I argue that the best available parent view, in its present formulation, struggles to accommodate for our very weighty duty not to perpetuate historical injustices. I offer an alternative view that reconciles this tension.
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  • Stepparenting and Moral Parenthood.Luara Ferracioli - forthcoming - Journal of Social Philosophy.
    At what point do stepparents become moral parents to the children under their care? What are their rights and duties prior to that point? What are their rights and duties once moral parenthood has been established? In this paper, I argue that we must fundamentally re-think the role of stepparents in children’s lives. More specifically, I argue that our social norms around romantic and familial relationships make it very difficult for stepparents and their children to have their core interests simultaneously (...)
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  • Should You Stick Around? Children’s Associational Rights and the Duties of Nonparental Caregivers.Connor K. Kianpour - forthcoming - The Journal of Ethics:1-19.
    Many believe that it is wrong for parents to prevent their children from associating with other adults. Many also believe that it is wrong for parents to prevent their children from continuing to associate with adults whose association with them is crucial to the children’s well-being. Call these adults the important associates of children. In this essay, I will argue that the considerations favoring the two judgments just mentioned also favor a further judgment. In particular, I will argue that important (...)
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  • Walking a Tightrope: Responding to Roth, Brandt, Russell, and Skow.Daniel Groll - 2023 - International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 16 (1):214-231.
    Responses to Brad Skow, Reuven Brandt, Camisha Russell and Amanda Roth's commentaries on *Conceiving People*.
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  • Introduction to the Special Issue on Children’s and Adolescents’ Rights.Anca Gheaus & Sabine Hohl - 2020 - Moral Philosophy and Politics 7 (2):191-197.
    Recent philosophical work on children and childhood has revealed many new questions concerning minors’ rights. This special issue of Moral Philosophy and Politics offers new contributions to the topics of paternalism, the nature of the right to parent and children’s voting. It also contains articles about the so far less explored questions of adolescents’ parental rights, minors’ rights against the harms of parental imprisonment, and their right to veto their own parents’ decision to relocate.
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  • Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Parents?Liam Shields - 2022 - Ethics 133 (1):133-146.
    Should parental rights be allocated to the best available parent? Anca Gheaus has argued that they should and that the interests of those who might rear them are strictly irrelevant to their allocation. This discussion article defends the view that parents’ interests are relevant to parental rights, against this latest argument. I show that the Best Available Parent View, as stated, conflicts with the exclusion of parental interests, on which it allegedly rests. I show that by including parental interests we (...)
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  • Defensive Kidnapping.Connor K. Kianpour - forthcoming - Moral Philosophy and Politics.
    Are private citizens ever morally permitted to abduct children and keep them in their custody, to protect them from their severely abusive or neglectful parents? Should private citizens face legal penalties for abducting children and keeping them in their custody, to protect them from their severely abusive or neglectful parents? In this essay, I offer arguments that support an affirmative answer to the first question and a negative answer to the second. Ultimately, I come out supporting a legal regime that (...)
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  • What Is A Family? A Constitutive-Affirmative Account.J. Y. Lee, R. Bentzon & E. Di Nucci - forthcoming - Journal of Bioethical Inquiry:1-11.
    Bio-heteronormative conceptions of the family have long reinforced a nuclear ideal of the family as a heterosexual marriage, with children who are the genetic progeny of that union. This ideal, however, has also long been resisted in light of recent social developments, exhibited through the increased incidence and acceptance of step-families, donor-conceived families, and so forth. Although to this end some might claim that the bio-heteronormative ideal is not necessary for a social unit to count as a family, a more (...)
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