Book reviewed in this article: Having Children: Philosophical and Legal Reflections on Parenthood. Edited by Onora O'Neill and William Ruddick.

Samuel Scheffler has identified two important objections to associative obligations, the voluntarist objection and the distributivist objection. The voluntarist is concerned about protecting the autonomy of the agent who is supposed to have associative obligations. However, the appropriate account of the source of associative obligations reveals that they pose no threat to autonomy, if we understand autonomy in a weak rather than a strong sense. The distributivist is worried about the claims of outsiders being ignored as the result of insiders (...) having associative obligations to one another. This objection loses much of its force when we understand the genuine implications of associative obligations. (shrink)