In this article, I challenge the widespread presumption that a child should have exactly two parents. I consider the pros and cons of various numbers of parents for the people most directly affected – the children themselves and their parents. The number of parents, as well as the ratio of parents to children, may have an impact on what resources are available, what relationships can develop between parents and children, what level of conflict can be expected in the family, as (...) well as the costs involved in parenting and the experience of parenting a child. Indirectly, there is also an effect on who will have the opportunity to be a parent, as well as on wider social issues that I mention but do not discuss. Having considered all these factors, I conclude that there is some reason to believe that three or more parents is usually better than one or two, especially if children are to have siblings, which is typically beneficial. However, these reasons are not strong enough to support a general presumption in favor of any particular number. We should therefore jettison the two‐parent presumption and make different numbers of parents more socially accepted as well as legally possible. (shrink)

Beliefs about the moral status of children have changed significantly in recent decades in the Western world. At the same time, knowledge about likely consequences for children of individual, parental, and societal choices has grown, as has the array of choices that (prospective) parents may have at their disposal. The intersection between these beliefs, this new knowledge, and these new choices has created a minefield of expectations from parents and a seemingly ever-expanding responsibility towards their children. Some of these new (...) challenges have resulted from progress in genetics and neuroscience. It is these challenges that we focus on in this introduction and volume. (shrink)

However far we are from either in practice, basic global and intergenerational justice, including climate change mitigation, are taken to be theoretically compatible. If population grows as predicted, this could cease to be the case. This paper asks whether that tragic legacy can now be averted without hard or even tragic choices on population policy. Current generations must navigate between: a high-stakes gamble on undeveloped technology; violating human rights; demanding unbearable sacrifices of the already badly off; institutional unfairness across adults; (...) institutional unfairness across children; failing to protect children’s basic interests; and threatening the autonomy of the family. We are not yet forced to choose between bequeathing a tragic choice and making one, by adopting basically unjust measures. However, even the remaining options present a morally hard choice. The fact we face it is yet another damning indictment on the combined actions and collective failures of the global elite. (shrink)

Common sense morality and legislations around the world ascribe normative relevance to biological connections between parents and children. Procreators who meet a modest standard of parental competence are believed to have a right to rear the children they brought into the world. I explore various attempts to justify this belief and find most of these attempts lacking. I distinguish between two kinds of biological connections between parents and children: the genetic link and the gestational link. I argue that the second (...) can better justify a right to rear. (shrink)

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 (...) wish to function as social parents of the child in question. This indicates that surrogacy contracts are illegitimate, and therefore should be void. (shrink)

John Locke occupies a central place in the contemporary philosophical literature on parental authority, and his child-centered approach has inspired a number of recognizably Lockean theories of parenthood.2 But unlike the best historically informed scholarship on other aspects of Locke's thought, those interested in his account of parental rights have not yet tried to understand its connection to debates of the period or to Locke's broader theory of natural law. In particular, Locke's relation to the seventeenth-century conversation about the role (...) of generation in grounding 'paternal power' is not well-known. Understanding this background is interesting in itself, but more importantly, it can provide us with a .. (shrink)

A short paper discussing the question of whether adults' interest in parenting can play a role in justifying the right to rear children.

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.

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. (...) I develop a view that meets this challenge. This Project View identifies the pursuit of a parental project as a distinctive non-instrumentally valuable good that provides a justification for the family and whose pursuit is necessary and sufficient for the acquisition of parental rights. This view grounds moral parenthood in a normative relation as opposed to a biological one, supports polyadic forms of parenting, and provides plausible guidance in cases of assisted reproduction. (shrink)

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 (...) better explain how parental rights should be distributed and over a wider range of cases. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to explore the forcefulness of the adoption challenge to procreative parenting. After framing the challenge, I consider two of the most developed attempts to respond to it, due to Luara Ferracioli and Elizabeth Brake. I argue that neither strategy is a promising way to vindicate the permissibility of procreative parenting. I then present several reasons to value procreative parenting that are underappreciated in the recent literature. Though these considerations deserve more philosophical attention, I’m (...) agnostic about whether they are strong enough to overcome the adoption challenge. I explain why this agnosticism is reasonable, and the debate about permissibility arguably intractable, in the context of prevailing deontological assumptions structuring discussions of procreation. I conclude by arguing that an independently interesting metaethical thesis, which I call deontic fictionalism, may give us some perspective on this debate and others like it. (shrink)

In the past, the Hague Conference on Private International Law has shaped how people can become the legal parents of children born in countries other than their own. It did so by creating the 1993 Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. It is now interested in developing a convention on international contract pregnancy. We discuss in this commentary what such a convention would have to include for it to be ethically consistent with the Convention on Adoption.

In this paper we re-examine Hugh LaFollette's proposal that the state carefully determine the eligibility and suitability of prospective parents before granting them a ?license to parent?. Assuming a prima facie case for licensing parents grounded in our duty to promote the welfare of the child, we offer several considerations that complicate LaFollette's radical proposal. We suggest that LaFollette can only escape these problems by revising his proposal in a way that renders the license effectively obsolete, a route he implicitly (...) adopts in his recent revisiting of the licensing proposal. We conclude that there is little merit in the idea of licensing ?natural? parents as a practical policy proposal, and raise some questions about its continued use in relation to adoptive and foster parents. (shrink)

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 (...) protected. The upshot of my discussion is not only that we must rethink what stepparents owe children under their care, but that stepparents are often morally entitled to shared custody of a child irrespective of the status of the romantic relationship she enjoys with the child's biological or adoptive parent. (shrink)

Do states have a right to exclude prospective immigrants as they see fit? According to statists the answer is a qualified yes. For these authors, self-determining political communities have a prima facie right to exclude, which can be overridden by the claims of vulnerable groups such as refugees and children born in the state’s territory. However, there is a concern in the literature that statists have not yet developed a theory that can protect children born in the territory from being (...) excluded from the political community. For if the self-determining political community has the right to decide who should form the self in the first place, then that right should count against both newcomers by immigration and newcomers by birth. Or so the concern goes. In this essay, I defend statism against this line of criticism and provide a liberal justification for the inclusion of children born within the state’s borders. My account leads to some surprising implication for citizenship law, as well as immigration arrangements in the area of asylum and unauthorized immigration. (shrink)

Rising rates of female incarceration within the United States are incompatible with the lack of federal standards outlining the rights of incarcerated mothers and their children. A robust body of evidence demonstrates that prison nurseries, programmes designed for mothers to keep their infants under their care during detainment or incarceration, provide essential and beneficial care that could not otherwise be achieved within the current carceral infrastructure. These benefits include facilitation of breastfeeding, bonding during a critical period of child development, and (...) decreased recidivism rates for participants. Legal precedent exists to support the rights of the mother to continue to parent their child but remains in stark opposition to current prison infrastructure that could allow them to do so. Existing state policies also have inconsistent mechanisms for determining child eligibility and should move to centre decision-making on a case-by-case basis. This work will demonstrate that a just society, supported by law and ensuring maternal–child welfare supports the establishment of prison nursery programmes as a part of the existing right to healthcare for incarcerated individuals. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that the relationship between a parent and a child is objectively valuable, but few believe that there is any objective value in first creating a child in order to parent her. But if it is indeed true that all of the objective value of procreative-parenting comes from parenting, then it is hard to see how procreative-parenting can overcome two particularly pressing philosophical challenges. A first challenge is to show that it is morally permissible for prospective parents to (...) procreate given that adoption takes us much closer to both environmental and social justice. A second challenge is to show that it is morally permissible for biological parents to parent their biological child given that other prospective parents are willing and able to do a much better job at furthering the child's interests. In this essay, I argue that there is value in procreative-parenting, and that this value is of sufficient magnitude so as to block both the case against procreation and the case in favour of child re-distribution. (shrink)

Equality of Opportunity is widely thought of as the normative ideal most relevant to the design of educational institutions. One widely discussed interpretation of this ideal is Rawls' principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity. In this paper I argue that theories, like Rawls, that give priority to the achievement of individual autonomy, are committed to giving that same priority to a principle of sufficient opportunity. Thus, the Rawlsian's primary focus when designing educational institutions should be on sufficiency and not equality. (...) The paper then argues this commitment has at least three attractive implications. Firstly, it enables defenders of Fair Equality of Opportunity to overcome Richard Arneson's powerful objections. Secondly, it suggests a revised version of the principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity that is more plausible. Thirdly, it has attractive practical implications for educational provision. (shrink)

Some commentators confer the right to children on those who gestate them because of the personal intimate relationship they say obtains in gestation.1 Benjamin Lange criticises two variants of that argument.2 He argues against the view that gestation creates a sui generis relationship that in its distinctiveness confers the right to the child on its gestator and the right of the child to its gestator. He also argues against the view that gestation involves a relationship whose dissolution necessarily causes morally (...) significant harm. I do not dispute these lines of reasoning, but the analysis goes further than Lange indicates. The reasons that Lange deploy to reject the relationship involved in gestation as conferring any kind of proprietary right to children also undercut that relationship as a ground of a presumptive duty towards those children. In the first instance, Lange disputes the idea that gestation produces a non-instrumental good that both the gestator and child have an interest in maintaining. In part, he argues that this kind of relationship lacks the emotional complexity, intimacy and intensity that underwrite other kinds of relationships, namely the very qualities that constitute the value of those relationships. More tellingly, he says, there is no unambiguous evidence that …. (shrink)

States combine the routine refusal of citizenship to migrants with policies that grant newborns of citizens (or residents) full membership of society without questions asked. This paper asks what, if anything, can justify this differential treatment of the two types of newcomers. It explores arguments for differential treatment based on the differential environmental impact, different impact on the (political) culture of the society in question and differences between the positions of the newcomers themselves. I conclude that, although some justification for (...) differential treatment exists, the case for it is weaker than one may expect and the grounds on which it can be justified are surprising and problematic. (shrink)

Perhaps the greatest determinant of individual and societal welfare is who raises children and with what degree of discretion. Philosophers have endeavored in myriad ways to provide normative justification for ascribing a right to be a legal parent and to possess particular legal powers as a parent. This Article shows why they fail and offers an alternative theoretical framework for delimiting parental rights. The prevailing tendency in philosophical writing on the topic is to begin with observations and intuitions specific to (...) parent-child relationships. Against that tendency, this Article demonstrates the need to begin with principles at a high level of generality, covering a broad range of human relationships. This yields a much more limited moral right in connection with parenthood than do accounts that fail to generalize. (shrink)

Assessing what counts as infertility has practical implications: access to (state-funded) fertility treatment is usually premised on meeting the criteria that constitute the chosen definition of infertility. In this paper, I argue that we should adopt the expression “involuntary childlessness” to discuss the normative dimensions of people’s inability to conceive. Once this conceptualization is adopted, it becomes clear that there exists a mismatch between those who experience involuntary childlessness and those that are currently able to access fertility treatment. My concern (...) in this article is explaining why such a mismatch deserves attention and what reasons can be advanced to justify addressing it. My case rests on a three-part argument: that there are good reasons to address the suffering associated with involuntary childlessness; that people would decide to insure against it; and that involuntary childlessness is characterized by a prima facie exceptional kind of desire. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the ways in which consideration of adolescent parents forces us to confront and question common presuppositions about parental rights. In particular, I argue that recognising the right of adolescent mothers not to be forcibly separated from their newborn children justifies rejecting the notion that parental rights are all acquired in the same manner and acquired as a ‘bundle’ of concomitant moral rights. I conclude that children and adolescents who conceive and give birth have some parental (...) rights concerning their newborn children – in particular, the right not to be forcibly separated from those children – even if they do not have the ‘full complement’ of parental rights as we generally characterise these. (shrink)

Among the most pressing philosophical questions occupying those interested in the ethics of the family is why should parents, as opposed to charity workers or state officials, raise children. In their recent Family Values, Brighouse and Swift have further articulated and strengthen their own justification of the parent-child relationship by appealing to its crucial role in enabling the child’s proper development and in allowing parents to play a valuable fiduciary role in the lives of children. In this paper, I argue (...) that the set of interests Brighouse and Swift identify as necessary for the justification of the family fails to account for the different stages and the different cultural settings that mark the parent-child relationship. In particular, I ague that their justification of the family fails to satisfy the following two desiderata: (i) that the justification for the parent-child relationship should ideally track the good-making feature(s) of the relationship that extend across its entire history, and (ii) such justification should ideally explain what is valuable about the parent-child relationship in both liberal and non-liberal family contexts. In light of my critique, I sketch an alternative account of family values, one that appeals directly to the special mode of caring we see in the parent-child relationship, a form of caring that is certainly present in non-liberal societies and that typically extends across a lifetime. (shrink)

Almost everyone accepts that parents must provide a good enough upbringing in order to retain custodial rights over children, but little has been said about how that level should be set. In this paper, I examine ways of specifying a good enough upbringing. I argue that the two dominant ways of setting this level, the Best Interests and Abuse and Neglect Views, are mistaken. I defend the Dual Comparative View, which holds that an upbringing is good enough when shortfalls from (...) the best alternative upbringing in terms of the child's interests are no more significant than the parents' interest. (shrink)

The case of Charlie Gard, an infant with a genetic illness whose parents sought experimental treatment in the USA, brought important debates about the moral status of parents and children to the public eye. After setting out the facts of the case, this article considers some of these debates through the lens of parental rights. Parental rights are most commonly based on the promotion of a child’s welfare; however, in Charlie’s case, promotion of Charlie’s welfare cannot explain every fact of (...) the case. Indeed, some seem most logically to extend from intrinsic parental rights, that is, parental rights that exist independent of welfare promotion. I observe that a strong claim for intrinsic parental rights can be built on arguments for genetic propriety and children’s limited personhood. Critique of these arguments suggests the scope of parental rights remains limited: property rights entail proper use; non-personhood includes only a small cohort of very young or seriously intellectually disabled children and the uniqueness of parental genetic connection is limited. Moreover, there are cogent arguments about parents’ competence to make judgements, and public interest arguments against allowing access to experimental treatment. Nevertheless, while arguments based on propriety may raise concerns about the attitude involved in envisioning children as property, I conclude that these arguments do appear to offer a prima facie case for a parental right to seek experimental treatment in certain limited circumstances. (shrink)

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. I develop a view that meets this challenge. This Project View identifies the pursuit of a parental project as a distinctive non-instrumentally valuable good that provides a justification for the family and whose pursuit is necessary and sufficient for the acquisition of parental rights. This view grounds moral parenthood in a normative relation as opposed to a biological one, supports polyadic forms of parenting, and provides plausible guidance in cases of assisted reproduction. (shrink)

The family disrupts equality while also, think many, providing goods of unique value. In Family Values, Brighouse and Swift tackle both of these tendencies, offering a refined and distinctive liberal egalitarian account both of the value of family life, and the limits of what may be done in its name. It builds up from an account of children's specific interests to a defence of ‘familial relationship goods’ as providing the best way of satisfying those interests. Thus though parenthood carries goods (...) of its own, parental prerogatives are delimited by what is good for children. The position which emerges plays out in nuanced, sometimes surprising ways. I raise three main lines of potential criticism, concerning, respectively, the distribution of family relationship goods, their value in relation to fair equality of opportunity, and the viability of distinguishing between family-located and other contributions to the realisation of a child's interests. (shrink)

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 (...) keeps what I call defensive kidnapping illegal, but in which public officials may use discretion when enforcing laws that criminalize kidnapping. Under such a regime, children who were severely abused or neglected by their parents but saved by a loving, capable private citizen would be spared from admission into the precarity of the child welfare system. (shrink)

The dominant philosophical view of gamete donation as morally permissible rests on two premises: parental obligations are triggered primarily by playing a causal role in procreation, not by genetic ties, and those obligations are transferable—that is, they are obligations to make adequate provision for the child’s needs, not necessarily to raise the child oneself. Thus while gamete donors are indeed agent causes of the children that their donation helps to bring into existence, most think that donors’ obligations are discharged insofar (...) as they know that competent others intend to care for those children. In this article, I call into question this dominant view by challenging both of its premises. Challenging the first premise, I argue that genetic parenthood is what primarily triggers parental obligations. Challenging the second premise, I claim that those obligations are non-transferable—i.e., that they are obligations not simply to ensure that someone will raise one’s genetic child, but to raise that child oneself . The implication of my argument is that gamete donation is inherently wrong insofar as it involves acquiring non-transferable obligations that one has no intention of fulfilling. (shrink)

Infants are unable to make their own decisions or express their own wishes about medical procedures and treatments. They rely on surrogates to make decisions for them. Who should be the decision-maker when an infant’s biological parents are also minors? In this paper, we analyse a case in which the biological mother is a child. The central questions raised by the case are whether minor parents should make medical decisions on behalf of an infant, and if so, what are the (...) limits to this decision-making authority? In particular, can they refuse treatment that might be considered best for the infant? We examine different ethical arguments to underpin parental decision-making authority; we argue that provided that minor parents are capable of fulfilling their parental duties, they should have a right to make medical decisions for their infant. We then examine the ethical limits to minor parents’ decision-making authority for their children. We argue that the restricted authority that teenagers are granted to make medical decisions for themselves looks very similar to the restricted autonomy of all parents. That is, they are permitted to make choices, but not harmful choices. Like all parents, minor parents must not abuse or neglect their children and must also promote their welfare. They have a moral right to make medical decisions for their infants within the same ‘zone of parental discretion’ that applies to adult parents. We conclude that adult and minor parents should have comparable decision-making authority for their infants. (shrink)