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)

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)

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 (...) of the ‘right to rear’) argues that there are several more moderate views of parental obligation which might also be thought to ground parental obligation. We first show that an obligation to breastfeed might result not from a general obligation to maximally benefit one’s child, but from what we call ‘choice-specific’ obligations to maximise benefit within particular activities. We then develop this idea through two views of parental obligation—the Dual Interest view, and the Best Custodian view—to ground an obligation to exclusively breastfeed on demand, before showing how both these more moderate views fail. (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)

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)